3

THE HEGEMON AWAKENS FROM ITS SLUMBERS

“The Chinese people have stood up. . . . Let the domestic and foreign reactionaries tremble before us!”

—CHAIRMAN MAO ZEDONG¹

Mao Zedong announced the founding of the People’s Republic of China in words of wounded national pride, in a speech that drips with a desire for vengeance against those who had brought the Middle Kingdom low:

The Chinese have always been a great, courageous and industrious nation; it is only in modern times that they have fallen behind. And that was due entirely to oppression and exploitation by foreign imperialism and domestic reactionary governments. For over a century our forefathers never stopped waging unyielding struggles against domestic and foreign oppressors. . . . Our forefathers enjoined us to carry out their unfulfilled will. . . . Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We have stood up. . . .The era in which the Chinese people were regarded as uncivilized is now ended. We shall emerge in the world as a nation with an advanced culture.

       Our national defense will be consolidated and no imperialists will ever again be allowed to invade our land. Our people’s armed forces must be maintained and developed with the heroic and steeled People’s Liberation Army as the foundation. We will have not only a powerful army but also a powerful air force and a powerful navy. . . . Let the domestic and foreign reactionaries tremble before us!²

Mao’s revolution breathed new life into the old hegemonic power which, awakened from its slumber, would soon set out upon the same well-traveled road it had traversed so many times before. In the eyes of China’s Communist elite, a cabal of Western and Western-oriented countries—Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, and America—had treacherously combined to attack the old Chinese empire, loosening China’s grip on hundreds of thousands of square miles of territory and a dozen tributary states in the process. It was time to recover it.

Mao harbored special rancor for the United States, fulminating in a bitterly sarcastic speech called “‘Friendship’ or Aggression” in late 1949,

The history of the aggression against China by U.S. imperialism, from 1840 when it helped the British in the Opium War to the time it was thrown out of China by the Chinese people, should be written into a concise textbook for the education of Chinese youth. The United States was one of the first countries to force China to cede extraterritoriality. . . . All the “friendship” shown to China by U.S. imperialism over the past 109 years, and especially the great act of “friendship” in helping Chiang Kai-shek slaughter several million Chinese the last few years—all this had one [purported] purpose . . . first, to maintain the Open Door, second, to respect the administrative and territorial integrity of China and, third, to oppose any foreign domination of China. Today, the only doors still open to [U.S. Secretary of State] Acheson and his like are in small strips of land, such as Canton and Taiwan.³

As we shall see in the next chapter, it was not long before the “concise textbook” that Mao called for in this speech appeared in print. For the next two decades that potted history was widely used to indoctrinate Chinese youth in the many “crimes” that America had supposedly committed against China. Although this anti-American screed was taken off the market in the eighties and nineties, it has now—tellingly—been republished in China.

FIRST EMPEROR OF THE MAO DYNASTY

Mao Zedong was better versed in Chinese history than in Marxist dialectics; he saw himself more as the founding emperor of a new dynasty than the ruler of a Communist state. His most famous poem, “White Snow,” reveals not only his imperial ambitions but also his boundless narcissism. Mao begins by exalting the beauty and majesty of the north China landscape in winter and ends by exalting himself—and denigrating the founding emperors of previous Chinese dynasties. Written at a time when the Long March had reduced the Chairman’s ragtag Red Army to fewer than eight thousand men (but not published until many years later), the poem stands as an extraordinary exercise in egotism and self-aggrandizement:

How beautiful these mountains and rivers,

enticing countless heroes to war and strife.

Too bad that Emperors Qin Shihuang and Han Wudi lacked culture

and that Emperors Tang Taizong and Song Taizu lacked romance.

Genghis Khan was the pride of his time,

though he was only good at shooting eagles with his bow.

They all belong to a time gone by,

Only today is a True Hero present.⁴

The “True Hero” was proposing himself, more or less accurately as it worked out, as the superior in both ability and ruthlessness to other dynastic founders. If Mao was offended by comparisons that many made between himself and Emperor Qin Shihuang, arguably the most hated figure in Chinese history, it was only because he saw himself as Emperor Qin’s superior in cunning and cruelty. At the Second Plenum of the Eighth Party Congress in May 1958, Mao scoffed, “Emperor Qin Shihuang was not that outstanding. He only buried alive 460 Confucian scholars. We buried 460 thousand Confucian scholars. [Some] have accused us of being Emperor Qin Shihuang. This is not true. We are a hundred times worse than Emperor Qin. To the charge of being like Emperor Qin, of being a dictator, we plead guilty. But you have not said nearly enough, for often we have to go further.”⁵

In another of his poems, Mao contrasted his admiration for Emperor Qin Shihuang and the Legalist order to his utter disdain for Confucius:

Please don’t slander Emperor Qin Shihuang, Sir

For the burning of the books should be thought through again.

Our ancestral dragon, though dead, lives on in spirit,

While Confucius, though renowned, was really rubbish.

The Qin order has survived from age to age. . . . [Emphasis added.]

Mao’s disdain for Confucianism was rooted less in his Marxism-Leninism than in his Legalism. Like the Legalist Emperor Han Xuandi, Mao despised the old Confucian orthodoxy for its impracticalities, for its moral niceties, for its preachiness about virtue and benevolence. Even more, he despised it because its tottering remains stood in the way of building a strong state that would dominate not just the Chinese people but neighboring peoples as well. Mao’s respect and admiration were reserved for the “ancestral dragon,” the Emperor Qin Shihuang of the Qin dynasty, who just happened to be one of the greatest tyrants in the long history of the human race.

Growing up at the turn of the twentieth century, Mao had steeped himself in Chinese historical classics, absorbing the frank and brutal Legalist advice they offered to would-be hegemons.⁶ “Know the future in the mirror of the past,” as the Chinese say, Jian wang zhi lai. Mao cast his eye over China’s long history and decided that it was the brutal Emperor Qin Shihuang that he would seek to emulate, and the hegemonic “Qin order” that he would seek to recreate. Never mind that more than twenty-two centuries had passed since his “ancestral dragon” had walked the earth. Mao, too, would forge a new dynasty by naked force. He, too, would rule China with an iron fist, resurrecting the totalitarian institutions earlier employed by his merciless hero.

To successfully establish the “Qin order” in the modern age, however, Mao needed two things. He needed to reconfigure Legalism for modern times. And he needed a replacement for Confucianism, a new “silken costume”, as it were, that would soften the harshness of his governance in the eyes of the people.

With the victory of the Communist revolution in Russia, Mao and the rest of China’s revolutionaries found an unlikely vehicle for their authoritarian ambitions: an imported Marxist ideology that was every bit as statist and elitist as traditional Chinese political culture, while at the same time claiming to be even more “modern” and “progressive” than its chief ideological opponent, liberal democracy.

Democracy, after all, is the hegemon’s bête noire. It disperses power among elected representatives instead of concentrating it in the hands of the ruler. It weakens the state instead of strengthening it. And, worst of all, it empowers the people instead of subjugating them. The principle of the self-determination of peoples is a particular threat to an ambitious hegemon because it justifies efforts by numerically dominant minorities living in border regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang to go their own way.

Marxism-Leninism, on the other hand, while formally acknowledging civil rights and the equality of man, was an enabler for the hegemon. It defended the monopoly of power by an educated elite and defined a relationship between state and society that was very much in keeping with China’s autocratic tradition. It was a much more effective tool of indoctrination than Confucianism, and its pseudoscientific terminology provided a stronger defense for autocratic rule. As a bonus, it even commanded a respectful audience in the very heart of Western society.

Communism was, in fact, an allegory for hegemony. It provided a road map showing how the revolution that had come to China was predestined to spread to neighboring countries. Meanwhile, China was justified in keeping a tight grip on border regions, since it would only be a matter of time until a common proletarian identity melded China’s diverse ethnic nationalities into one Sinic whole. For Chinese intellectuals who admired Western scientific advances but were repelled by the radical individualism underlying Western values and fearful of China’s survival as a nation if democratic rule were adopted, “scientific” Marxism-Leninism offered a comfortable compromise. Thousands of them were drawn into the Chinese Communist Party by the promise that, while Western science would be used to strengthen China, in the meantime the authoritarian Party structure would ensure that China did not fall asunder. The Chinese empire in which they took so much pride would remain intact, while chaos—the fracturing and disintegrating of the Chinese polity—would be avoided at all costs.

So even as Mao was importing Marxism-Leninism from the West, he was adapting it to China’s unique totalitarian heritage. The Leninist party structure was a natural fit with pre-existing Chinese imperial practices at both the ideological and the organizational levels. Transitioning from the absolute authority of the emperor to the absolute authority of the CCP and its leaders required only a minor mental adjustment.

This fact is not lost on contemporary China scholars such as the National University of Singapore’s Zheng Yongnian. They agree that the Chinese Communist Party, despite its superficial resemblance to the former Communist Party of the Soviet Union, is an entirely different species of political animal. Zheng himself calls this new-old system “an organizational emperor,” emphasizing that the current structure is an outgrowth of imperial practices. “In many respects,” Zheng says, “[the CCP] wields its power in a way similar to Chinese emperors of the past. . . . For example, like an emperor in dynastic China who regarded himself and also was regarded by society as the only legitimate ruler (an individual), the CCP has also perceived itself and is perceived by others as the only ruling party (as an organization) in the country.”⁷

While Zheng’s phrase “organizational emperor” is an apt description of the collective leadership that preceded the consolidation of power by Mao Zedong, during the final decades of his life the Great Helmsman clearly wielded his authority in a more imperial manner. It is not literary license that has led countless writers to describe Mao as an emperor.⁸ The appearance of collective leadership that followed Mao’s death was largely an artifact of Deng Xiaoping’s apparent reluctance to dominate the public stage in the same way that he dominated private decision-making. And, as we will see in chapter six, following Xi Jinping’s elevation to the position of Party leader, he has moved rapidly to concentrate power into his own hands. Xi’s formal title may still be General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, but Big Daddy Xi, as he is known, is for all practical purposes already a Red Emperor in the Maoist mold.

As far as the highly bureaucratized nature of Party rule is concerned, what is this but a natural elaboration of a complex set of imperial offices that, under the control of the nine-tiered mandarinate, had been in existence in China for centuries? From an organizational point of view, all the Leninist party system did was enable the imperium to be concentrated even more effectively in the hands of the Politburo than the traditional structures previously relied upon by the emperors. So the new power structures were instantly recognizable, and largely acceptable, to patriotic intellectuals eager see the hegemon awaken from its century-long slumber.

For the illiterate or semiliterate villagers who became the foot soldiers of Mao’s armies, the principles of liberal democracy were unknown and the abstractions of Marxist-Leninist ideology a mystery. But resonance with dynastic China’s Confucian beliefs and imperial traditions helped to make communism and its leader acceptable. Marxist dialectics militated for change, just as did yin-yang theory and the I Ching (Book of Change). The state remained the grand provider on whom all ultimately relied for their survival. The paternalistic Party as the vanguard of the proletariat was understood as a stand-in for the “father-mother officialdom” of imperial times. And its “chairman” was the omnipotent savior—the Red Emperor—upon whose benevolent rule all of his subjects depended.

Mao’s “personality cult” was already flourishing by April 1945, when the new Party constitution declared the “Thought of Mao Zedong” essential to “guide the entire work” of the Party. The Chairman was praised as “not only the greatest revolutionary and statesman in Chinese history but also the greatest theoretician and scientist.” Much of this fulsome praise was written by Mao’s own hand.⁹

The cult of the Party chairman was seen as a continuation of the cult of the emperor. The Party went to extraordinary lengths to prey upon the superstitions of the people. Mao was endlessly exalted as a larger-than-life figure, a kind of living god who would rescue the people from all manner of suffering and oppression. As soon as the Communists captured a village in the civil war, its buildings would blossom with slogans such as “Mao Zedong is the great savior of the Chinese people.”

As for Mao himself, he may have served communism, but only because it served his own purposes so well. If the emperors had been “Confucianist on the outside, Legalist on the inside,” then Mao was effectively “Communist on the outside, Legalist on the inside.” As cynical and sophisticated as the most ruthless Legalist rulers, he took full advantage of China’s millennia-long totalitarian tradition to consolidate his rule. A study of references and quotations in Mao’s Selected Works is revealing in this regard. Some 24 percent come from Stalin, the most ruthless Soviet leader. But almost as many—22 percent—come from traditional Chinese sources.¹⁰ In his later speeches, references to traditional sources become even more common, while Stalin and his sayings disappeared down the memory hole. Mao Zedong had become what he had long admired: the founder of a new dynasty, an emperor of the Legalist school, and the latest in a long line of hegemons.¹¹

As the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao controlled an organization that even Qin Shihuang would have admired for its rigid discipline, its highly elaborated organizational structure, and its designs on the total control of society. A Communist party, Mao instinctively understood from the beginning, is a “war party.”¹² War is its element, protracted conflict its means, and the seizure of power its ultimate end. It is so admirably suited to these martial purposes that it is, in effect, a force multiplier. By organizing his initially tiny base areas—first in Jinggangshan and later in Yan’an—along military lines, Mao was able to punch well above his weight, vanquish his intra-party enemies, and eventually conquer the entire country.

Wei Jingsheng, one of China’s long incarcerated and now exiled dissidents, notes that, even today the CCP is organized and run as if it and the country it controls were at war.¹³ And, in one way or another, it is. China’s military-industrial complex, which operates under the rubric of civil-military integration (CMI), is second to none.¹⁴ The CCP wars on its own population through political campaigns such as the one-child, now two-child, policy and the persecution of the Falungong. And China is at war with the world (whether the world knows it or not) through its territorial claims in the South China sea and elsewhere, through its use of destabilizing proxies such as North Korea, and even more directly through its theft of technology, its currency manipulations, and its highly sophisticated and incessant cyberattacks.

THE LEGALIST RESTORATION

With the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, both the Chinese people and the world were told that the future had come to China. Viewed from a long-term historical perspective, however, it looked suspiciously like a case of back to the future.¹⁵ The ideological justifications used to legitimate Communist rule differed in many particulars, to be sure, from those of its Confucian predecessors. The central political myth of imperial China was that the emperor held his place by divine sanction and led by moral example, and that as long as he maintained Confucian standards of public virtue he would continue to enjoy this “Mandate of Heaven.” The central myth of the People’s Republic of China, at least for decades after its founding, was identical to that of other Communist states, namely, that the Chinese Communist Party (“the Vanguard of the Proletariat”) and its leaders were temporarily exercising dictatorial power on behalf of the “masses” for their own good and in anticipation of the eventual “withering away” of the state.

But if the wineskin was new, its contents remained the bitter gall of vintage Legalism. The CCP takeover reversed the brief efflorescence of civil society in China in the first decades of the twentieth century, restoring the traditional Chinese pattern of state-society relations in which society is almost totally subservient to the state. Legalism was reborn in China, although it was veiled in Communist terminology and gave formal deference to a theory of civil rights that the emperors would have scorned. Communist to all outward appearances, the new Chinese state was Legalist in essence, continuing the autocratic tradition of the imperial Chinese state by:

         •    imposing an official ideology (Marxism-Leninism-Maoism) with interesting functional parallels to Chinese imperial orthodoxy (Legalism-Confucianism);

         •    concentrating political power in the hands of a tiny minority, often of one, with power deriving ultimately from control of the military and wielded without appreciable institutional constraints;

         •    treating the penal code and the legal system as tools of governance wielded by the ruler, who acts above legal constraints;

         •    dominating most, and at times all, aspects of domestic commercial and economic life;

         •    controlling all forms of social organization outside the nuclear family, which itself is severely restricted;

         •    engaging in political practices familiar from dynastic times, such as censorship, large-scale persecutions, purges of the bureaucracy, court intrigues, and elite factional conflicts;

         •    regarding the people as its property, as subjects rather than citizens.

The nascent civil society that had grown up during the republican era was eradicated. Those formerly in leadership positions were “reeducated” or simply executed. The organizations they had formerly headed were either co-opted or destroyed. Newspapers and magazines were brought under state control or closed down entirely. Private and Christian schools were taken over by the state. Voluntary associations were disbanded or amalgamated into Party-led front groups. By the end of the five-year period following 1949, few vestiges of China’s once-flourishing civil society still survived. Chinese society had come to resemble that of an archetypal Communist state—or equally, that of a Chinese imperial dynasty.¹⁶

As an emperor of the Legalist school—that is to say, the hegemon—Mao believed that the Mandate of Heaven gave him license to dominate, well, everything. He was obsessed by the idea that he could become the leader of a truly global revolutionary movement, and that China’s greatness would be manifested through him as he reshaped the world in China’s image. Using Communist internationalism as an ideological cover, China would return to the center of the world by supporting the Third World and “liberating” all humanity.¹⁷ First and foremost, of course, there was the matter of firmly subjugating the Chinese people. The incessant political campaigns of the PRC’s early years came about because of Mao’s determination to emulate China’s “ancestral dragon” and eliminate, utterly and without mercy, all possible opposition to his absolute rule within China.

At the same time, China’s traditional dominions cried out to be returned to the embrace of the Middle Kingdom. What kind of hegemon would Mao be if he did not recapture lost territories, recover straying vassals, and force one-time tributary states to again follow China’s lead? Military action—engaging the Japanese invaders, defeating the Nationalists, and capturing the cities—had delivered China into his hands. Now military action would restore the empire. For these reasons Mao intervened in Korea in the early years of his rule, invaded Tibet, bombarded Quemoy, continued to bluster over Taiwan, attacked India over Tibetan border questions, confronted the Soviet Union, and sent troops and massive amounts of war material to Vietnam.

Mao may also be said to have invented “mapfare”—the use of contrived maps to establish territorial claims to outlying territories. Under his direction, maps were drawn up showing China’s borders extending far to the north, south, and west of the area that the PLA actually controlled. Any territory that had been touched by China, however briefly, was regarded as rightfully Beijing’s. Father Seamus O’Reilly, a Columban missionary who was one of the last foreign Catholic priests to leave China in 1953, recalls seeing, in the office of the local Communist officials who interrogated him, a map of the PRC that included all of Southeast Asia—Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Thailand, and Singapore—within China’s borders.¹⁸

But such maps were initially marked for internal distribution only. For Mao, although willing to undertake limited military actions to restore China’s imperium piece-by-piece, was uncharacteristically coy about his overall hegemonic aims. There were powerful forces arrayed along his borders, and he did not want to face them all at once. The United States occupied Japan and South Korea, and had bases in the Philippines and Thailand. The British were in Hong Kong and Malaysia. Even his erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union, was occupying huge swaths of Chinese territory in Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang. Thus, even as his troops were engaged in Korea or Tibet, Mao continually sought to reassure the world, in the policy equivalent of a Freudian slip, “We will never seek hegemony.”

“When hemmed in, resort to stratagems,” advised Sunzi. The diplomatic establishment of the PRC, headed by the charming and crafty Premier Zhou Enlai, developed not just one stratagem, but three. The first was for China to play the role of a loyal member of the Soviet-dominated Communist bloc. The second was to take an anti-colonial posture as a member—indeed the leading member—of the Third World, a posture used to great effect with India, for example. The third stratagem, which proved increasingly useful as time went on, involved posing as a responsible member of the post-Westphalian international system, a respecter of international agreements and international borders, as merely one nation-state among many. Each of these postures seemed to reflect a certain truth about the PRC. But each of them was based on a deception.

Mao’s adopted ideology demanded that lip service be paid to international Communist unity, but the relationship of China’s “revolutionary, statesman, theoretician and scientist” with Stalin was complicated from the beginning. Mao was grateful for Stalin’s aid but suspicious that the Soviet leader was trying to keep China disunited and weak, and more often than not he rejected his advice. In 1936 Mao ousted the “28 Bolsheviks” that Stalin’s Comintern had foisted upon the CCP, thus reducing Moscow’s influence over his guerilla movement. In 1945 he rejected out of hand Stalin’s staggering suggestion that he disband his army and join Chiang Kai-shek’s government, advice he later ridiculed.¹⁹

The USSR’s late entry into the war against Japan had allowed Soviet troops to occupy parts of Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, and Xinjiang. Mao could do little about this insult to China’s sovereignty until the CCP had emerged victorious in the civil war, at which point he journeyed to the Soviet Union for two months of hard negotiations with Stalin. The terms of the Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance that Mao and Stalin signed on February 12, 1950, gave Moscow a degree of economic and political leverage within China all too reminiscent of the old colonial days. For example, Mao had told Edgar Snow in the late 1930s that Mongolia would “automatically” be part of the new China, but now he was forced to concede the existence of a separate “People’s Republic of Mongolia.”²⁰

By 1958 Mao was publicly expressing unhappiness over the way these negotiations had gone: “In 1950 I argued with Stalin in Moscow for two months. On the questions of the Treaty of Mutual Assistance, the Chinese Eastern Railway, the joint-stock companies and the border we adopted two attitudes: one was to argue when the other side made proposals we did not agree with, and the other was to accept their proposal if they absolutely insisted. This was out of consideration for the interests of socialism.”²¹

Despite his unhappiness at Russian “colonialism,” Mao had accomplished his principal goals, which were the removal of all Soviet forces from Chinese soil, the return of the China Eastern Railway and Dalian (Port Arthur), and the avoidance of any additional territorial concessions. Mao’s determination to recover China’s lost grandeur did not include kowtowing to one of the imperialistic powers that had humiliated it, even if it happened to be a member of the same ideological camp. For the Chinese, Soviet ascendance meant domination by a people that, rightly or wrongly, they regarded as culturally inferior. “The hungry land,” as they called Russia, was not going to devour any additional Chinese territory.²²

On January 12, 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave a speech at the National Press Club, the main thrust of which was that China, if left alone by the West, would soon break with the Soviet Union. The Soviet “absorption” of Outer and Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Manchuria, he vigorously asserted, was “the most important fact in the relations of any foreign power with Asia.” America must avoid conflict with China so as not to “deflect from the Russians to ourselves the righteous anger and the wrath and the hatred of the Chinese people which must develop.”²³

Ironically, Acheson’s speech is not remembered for its prescience on the issue of a Sino-Soviet split but for its contribution to the outbreak of hostilities on the Korean peninsula. Having been assured that Stalin had not targeted South Korea for aggression, Acheson famously failed to include it within the U.S. defense perimeter in Asia as he defined it. Seizing upon this omission, North Korean Communist dictator Kim Il-Sung soon thereafter convinced Stalin to allow him a “limited offensive.” On June 25 of that same year, the entire North Korean army poured across the border and fell upon the almost defenseless south.

This was Mao’s first opportunity to reassert China’s traditional prerogatives over one-time vassal states, and he did not hesitate. With the world’s attention fixed on the Korean peninsula, he sent elements of the People’s Liberation Army to take control of Tibet. On October 21, 1950, the Dalai Lama was forced to sign an agreement acknowledging Chinese sovereignty. Tibet became a protectorate of China, although it would continue to control its own domestic affairs for a time, albeit under ever-increasing Chinese scrutiny and supervision.

Over on the Korean peninsula, the war had quickly turned against Kim Il-Sung. By late November 1950, American forces under the command of General Douglas MacArthur were approaching the Yalu River, which separates Korea from China. With his half-kingdom fast disappearing, Kim appealed to China for succor—exactly what tributary states were expected to do when threatened by outside powers.

Mao promptly responded with a grand imperial gesture, throwing a huge “volunteer” army into the fray. He was not reacting to a threat but seizing an opportunity, namely, reestablishing Chinese suzerainty over a once and future tributary state.²⁴ Recklessly inviting casualties, the Chinese army advanced by overwhelming the beleaguered Americans in wave after wave of attacks, eventually forcing them to retreat south of the 38th parallel. After intense fighting, the front was consolidated near the 38th parallel in October, and Kim Il-Sung’s half-kingdom was restored.

Mao later summed up the Korean War in a 1958 speech to his generals as “a big war in which we defeated America and obtained valuable experience.”²⁵ If Korea is regarded strictly as a military contest, Mao’s comment may seem mere conceit. After all, the PLA lost at least a quarter of a million men (as opposed to some thirty-four thousand American casualties), gained no territory over the original North-South partition, and settled for a negotiated armistice. But viewed as a bid by the hegemon to recover a tributary state, Mao’s intervention was an impressive first step. He had fought the United States to a standstill, establishing China as a military power to be reckoned with. He had impressed the Soviets, who had been unwilling to commit ground forces to the fray. Even more important, he had brought at least the northern half of the Korean peninsula back into its traditional relationship of dependency on China (and away from its dependency on the Soviet Union). The second step toward the restoration of Chinese hegemony over Asia had been taken.

THE SINO-SOVIET SPLIT

Although Mao was never comfortable with the Soviet domination of the Sino-Soviet relationship, he was for many years careful to avoid open criticism of the Russians. But Khrushchev’s “secret speech” discrediting Stalin, delivered to the CPSU Twentieth Congress in February 1956, marked a turning point. Whatever compunction Mao may have felt about criticizing the Soviet leadership, at least in private, vanished. Talking to the Politburo in 1956, Mao warned, “We must not blindly follow the Soviet Union. . . . Every fart has some kind of smell, and we cannot say that all Soviet farts smell sweet.” He was irritated at his countrymen’s propensity to worship all things Soviet. He complained at one point that he “couldn’t have eggs or chicken soup for three years because an article appeared in the Soviet Union which said that one shouldn’t eat them. . . . It didn’t matter whether the article was current or not, the Chinese listened all the same and respectfully obeyed.” He mocked Chinese artists who, when painting pictures of him and Stalin, “always made me a little bit shorter, thus blindly knuckling under to the moral pressure exerted by the Soviet Union at that time.”²⁶ He remained conciliatory in public, however, largely because he was hoping to get his hands on Soviet nuclear weapons.

Mao’s eagerness to acquire nuclear weapons, so as to confirm China’s newly achieved great-power status, knew no bounds. It was an essential part of his “prepare for war” campaign, which was the basis of all his economic programs.²⁷ Although he had earlier rejected a Soviet offer to set up its own nuclear-armed bases on Chinese soil as an affront to Chinese sovereignty, Mao managed to convince Stalin’s successor to aid China’s nuclear weapons program. When Khrushchev initially declined, Mao resorted to bombing and strafing the Nationalist-held islands of Quemoy (Jinmen) and Matsu (Mazu), provoking a confrontation with America that carried serious risks for the Soviet Union.²⁸ As Mao had hoped, the fear of nuclear war with the United States scared Khrushchev into providing China with the technological assistance Mao’s engineers needed to make the bomb. A nuclear technology transfer agreement to this end was signed in 1957. Under this agreement, Khrushchev later recalled, the Chinese received “almost everything they asked for. We kept no secrets from them. Our nuclear experts co-operated with their engineers and designers who were busy building a bomb.”²⁹

The Soviets were about to hand over a prototype bomb when Mao’s continued saber rattling over Taiwan gave them second thoughts. As Mao prepared to invade Quemoy and Matsu in September 1958, Khrushchev advised caution. Mao was deeply offended, in part because he no longer respected Soviet military advice.³⁰ When Khrushchev pointedly reminded him that America possessed nuclear weapons, Mao airily dismissed the possibility of mass casualties. “So what if we lose 300 million people,” the Great Helmsman told a stunned Khrushchev. “Our women will make it up in a generation.” He had made the same point the year before in only slightly less dramatic fashion. In his famous speech “American Imperialism Is a Paper Tiger” given at the World Communist Representative Meeting in Moscow in November 1957, Mao had said, “I’m not afraid of nuclear war. There are 2.7 billion people in the world; it doesn’t matter if some are killed. China has a population of 600 million; even if half of them are killed, there are still 300 million people left. I’m not afraid of anyone.”³¹

In June 1959 Khrushchev, convinced he was dealing with a madman, or at least a pathological narcissist, unilaterally abrogated the agreement that was to have provided China with an atomic weapon.³² Mao was furious. He privately denounced Soviet meddling in Chinese affairs, telling members of the Military Affairs Commission in September, “It is absolutely impermissible to go behind the back of our fatherland to collude with a foreign country.”³³ The Soviets were “revisionists,” China was soon telling the world, and as such constituted a greater threat to the world than American “imperialism.” Going its own way, China was now less a part of an international revolutionary movement than the reawakening hegemon slowly regaining control over its known world.³⁴

With the onset of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the war of words escalated, and armed clashes broke out at several points along China’s four-thousand-mile border with the Soviet Union. Mao dispatched additional troops to the border and on March 2, 1969, on the Chairman’s orders, a battalion-sized PLA force ambushed Soviet patrols on the Wusuli River. The Soviets promptly retaliated, and during the next two years there were repeated skirmishes at many points along the frontier.

The Ninth Party Congress, held April 1–24 that same year, took an openly hegemonic tone. The only published speech was that of Lin Biao, then Chairman Mao’s heir apparent, who repeated Mao’s formula that a third world war would promote revolution and dig the graves of both revisionism and imperialism. “We must be ready for a conventional war and also for an atomic war,” Lin said. “Both the Soviet Union and the United States are paper tigers.” The present border between the Soviet Union and China could be made the basis of negotiation, he avowed, but Moscow would first have to admit that the historical border treaties were “unequal treaties.”³⁵

The Soviets threatened nuclear attacks on the Chinese heartland and deployed forty-four heavily armed mobile assault divisions along the border. Though the crisis passed with no territory changing hands, the message was clear: the existing border was ultimately dependent on Soviet strength, not Chinese acquiescence.

STRANGLING TIBET

After PLA troops entered Tibet in 1950, the government of the Dalai Lama was gradually isolated. Members of the international community who questioned Chinese actions were haughtily informed that the Tibetan question was a purely internal affair. The Himalayan plateau had been an integral part of China for centuries, Beijing’s story went, having been brought under China’s sway as early as the seventh century, when the Tang Emperor Li Shimin sent his daughter Princess Wencheng as a bride to the great Tibetan King Songtsen Gampo. The princess bestowed culture on the uncouth Tibetans, bringing them and their land forever into the debt and the orbit of China’s superior civilization.

In fact, the emperor sent his favorite daughter, famed for her beauty and talents, as a peace offering to Songtsen Gampo because he had a healthy respect for the military prowess of his Himalayan neighbors, not because he intended to civilize them. Had the Tibetan king been seeking a closer association with Chinese culture, the tribute would have flowed the other way.

The Chinese Communists, having promised to respect Tibet’s autonomy, instead gradually suffocated its political and religious institutions over the course of the 1950s. Half of what had traditionally been considered Tibetan territory was carved up and handed over to other provinces where Chinese were in the majority. The process of Sinicization was accelerated during the chaotic days of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962), when Mao’s cadres carried class warfare into the Land of the Snows, sacking monasteries and killing monks. When the Tibetans rose up in protest in 1959, Beijing, claiming that the Tibetan local government had “instigated a rebellion,” used brute force to consolidate total control.³⁶

On March 25, 1959, after heavy fighting, Chinese Communist troops occupied Lhasa. The Dalai Lama fled the capital. Beijing announced that its army had “swiftly put down the rebellion in Lhasa and was mopping up the rebels in some other places in Tibet.” The Tibetan government under the Dalai Lama was formally dissolved, replaced by a puppet regime headed by the twenty-one-year-old Panchen Lama. For the first time since the thirteenth century, the Tibetans did not control their own country.³⁷

To justify their intervention, the Chinese Communists invented a mythological Tibet where the masses were enslaved by a slothful priestly class. The propaganda machine churned out horror stories of a dark and brutal theocracy of bonded labor, vast monastic fiefs, indolent monks, and immoral abbots. As late as 1998 the Chinese Communist Party, in the person of Party Secretary Jiang Zemin, was still patting itself on the back for ending monkish “slavery” in Tibet.³⁸

In order to bring the partly nomadic Tibetan population under control, the Chinese herded them into the commune system, a new form of serfdom far worse than anything in Tibet’s past. As in China proper, the commune system proved to be an economic and ecological disaster of the first magnitude. Chinese agricultural officials ordered the Tibetans to raise wheat rather than the barley they preferred, and the resulting crop failures on the high Himalayan plain, with its short growing season, left the Tibetans malnourished and starving.

Meanwhile, the monasteries and nunneries were emptied and the monks and nuns put to work in the communes. The seventy-thousand-character Petition of the Panchen Lama, written in 1962, states that 97 percent of Tibet’s two thousand monasteries were destroyed, presumably by the People’s Liberation Army, following the 1959 uprising. A few years later, the Cultural Revolution completed this destructive work. All of China suffered from the depredations of Chairman Mao’s Red Guards, but Tibet, outside the Chinese cultural sphere, was a special target. Thanks to Beijing’s propaganda, the young Red Guard zealots saw Tibet as the very embodiment of a corrupt and exploitative feudal tradition, and they set about with picks, shovels and even their bare hands destroying every religious edifice and artifact they could find. By the time their rampage ended, Tibet’s few remaining stupas and lamaseries were in ruins.

WAR WITH INDIA

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India insisted on recognizing China’s “rights” in Tibet despite the pleas of the Tibetans, along with many Indians, that he weigh in against this new form of Chinese hegemony. His appeasement of the “New China” came back to haunt him in 1959 when the Chinese, having disposed of the Dalai Lama and his followers, began building military roads right up to the existing Indian-Tibetan border, and then, in early September, crossed over into India.

China’s aggression took Nehru completely by surprise, which is perhaps less a consequence of his naiveté than of Zhou Enlai’s sophisticated sales pitch about the two countries being fellow victims of the Western imperial powers. The Chinese premier had first visited the Indian prime minister in New Delhi in April 1954, stopping over on his way back to China from the signing the Geneva peace accord on Indochina. Zhou played the stratagem to the hilt, portraying the PRC as a country with impeccable anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist credentials, a country that was a natural member of the Third World club. Nehru bought it.

The Indian prime minister, to be sure, had been favorably disposed toward the People’s Republic of China from the beginning. India had been the first “capitalist” country to recognize China (in April 1950), the leading non-Communist proponent for admitting the PRC into the United Nations, and the principal intermediary between Beijing and Washington during the Korean War.

The result of Zhou’s 1954 visit was a joint communiqué based on China’s “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.” Nehru breathlessly announced that relations between India and China would henceforth be governed by “mutual respect for territorial sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, mutual non-intervention in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence.” These high-sounding principles were reaffirmed at the April 1955 Conference of Asian Countries in New Delhi, and again at the Conference of Asian and African Countries in Bandung, Indonesia.³⁹ By that point, Nehru had assumed the role of Zhou’s patron, eager to advance Zhou’s cause by smoothing over China’s past support for destabilizing guerilla movements throughout the region. For his part, Zhou spoke of the “Bandung Spirit,” a new policy of peacefully wooing nonaligned nations in the region according to the Five Principles. Mesmerized by the Five Principles and the Bandung Spirit, Nehru could not bring himself to see that India and China had fundamentally divergent interests. He didn’t understand that having a shared border with the hegemon, which always sees “borders” as merely temporary accommodations to existing geopolitical realities, was a risky business.

The Indian delegation at the UN was arguing passionately on behalf of Communist China’s admission to the General Assembly on the very day that PLA forces began pouring across the border into India. As Nehru pondered Chinese perfidy, PLA troops continued their march southward, seizing two important mountain passes that guard approaches to Sikkim and India.

On September 4 an obviously nonplussed Nehru announced that the Chinese Communists had accused India of “aggression” and demanded that India evacuate “Chinese territory.” At first he called the dispute “rather absurd” and indicated that he would be willing to make some minor adjustments to the border. But Nehru soon realized that the Chinese claim was “much more serious” than he had originally thought and “quite impossible for India ever to accept.” He declared that India had “undertaken the defense of Sikkim and Bhutan, and anything that happens on their borders is the same as if it happened on the borders of India.”

Nehru allowed two years of border skirmishes before responding to the pleas of his generals for leave to stop the slow-moving Chinese steamroller. In the event, the ill-planned Indian counterattack proved a disaster, and the Chinese advance picked up speed. As tens of thousands of square miles of disputed territory passed into Chinese control, Nehru panicked and requested help from the Soviet Union and America. Moscow condemned the Chinese advance, and the Seventh Fleet steamed up the Bay of Bengal. The Chinese, having gotten what they wanted, offered a cease-fire. An overwrought Nehru, who had begun to have nightmares about Chinese troops on the Ganges, was only too glad to accept.

EXPANSION BY GUERRILLA WARFARE

The PRC had initially supported Maoist-style Communist parties in Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, Burma, India, and Thailand. The Malaysian Communist Party launched an armed rebellion, which the PRC supported until it became clear that the guerrillas were losing to a brilliant British counterinsurgency campaign. At the Bandung Conference, a conciliatory Zhou Enlai declared that those Chinese who adopted another nationality should be good citizens of the countries they joined. But this pious statement did not completely allay suspicions that China was encouraging indigenous Communist movements among the citizens of other Southeast Asian countries.

After the invasion of India, Beijing once more began manifesting a new militancy toward countries in Southeast Asia. The Bandung Spirit was a thing of the past. Instead, Communist China began to act in accordance with an ancient Chinese strategem known as yuan chiao chin kung, meaning “to appease distant countries while attacking those nearby.”⁴⁰ Faraway Canada, Italy, Belgium, Chile, and Mexico were courted for diplomatic recognition while neighboring countries such as Burma, Indonesia, Thailand, India, and Laos were attacked in word, and sometimes in deed.

Laos, one of three Indochina states covered by Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) protection, was a specific target. Although small in size and population, the country was important because of its strategic location between China, North Vietnam, and the non-Communist states of Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and South Vietnam. It also had had a tributary relationship with China going back to the year 1400. In the late fifties, China began supplying the Pathet Lao Communist guerrilla group with ever increasing amounts of military aid. The United States countered with its own expanded program of military and economic assistance. The conflict intensified in 1959 as North Vietnam, with Chinese encouragement, sent military units across the border to reinforce the Pathet Lao. On September 4, Laos appealed to the UN to dispatch an emergency force to counter aggression by North Vietnam. The United States responded by warning both the Soviet Union and Communist China that it would help counter any new danger to peace in the region. The Soviets responded positively and with the support of the United States a peace treaty was signed between the Pathet Lao and Prince Sihanouk’s government in 1962. Mao, having none of it, encouraged the North Vietnamese military to support the Pathet Lao. By 1964 several thousand more North Vietnamese troops were battling in Laos, and the peace treaty was a dead letter. China responded by stepping up its aid to the Pathet Lao, who eventually won control of the country, bringing Lao back into China’s orbit.

Mao’s goal in Southeast Asia was clear: to re-establish the tributary states that had existed during the height of Chinese imperial rule. This time, however, he would use the guise of communist “liberation” to enforce Chinese influence in the region. In reality, it was more of the same system that existed before—establish the Middle Kingdom as the hegemon of the region.⁴¹

When America began sending military assistance to South Vietnam in the early sixties, China responded by coming to the aid of its tributary. China not only positioned large numbers of forces on the North Vietnamese border as a deterrent to a U.S.-led thrust into the north, it also deployed forces in country. One study has reported that between 1965 and 1972 over 320,000 PLA troops served in Vietnam, peaking at 170,000 troops in 1967. They served largely in antiaircraft and engineering capacities, seeking to bring down U.S. aircraft and repair the damage caused by the U.S. bombing of transportation nodes.⁴² In addition to men, copious amounts of materiel also flowed into North Vietnam. China supplied an estimated 270,000 guns, 5,400 artillery pieces, 200 million rounds of ammunition, 900,000 artillery shells, over 700 tons of TNT, 200,000 military uniforms, and 4 million meters of cloth to Hanoi over the course of the conflict.⁴³

In Indonesia, the local Communist Party, responding in part to encouragement and aid from Beijing, launched a coup against General Sukarno’s increasingly restive generals in 1962. This particular gambit backfired on Beijing. The result was a bloody purge of suspected Communists, which quickly developed anti-Chinese overtones. As many as a million lives were lost, many of them ethnic Chinese. The food distribution system and other large sectors of the economy that had been run by this mercantile minority consequently collapsed. Centuries after assaults upon Java and Sumatra by imperial Chinese forces, the Indonesian archipelago had once again eluded China’s grasp.

TAIWAN

Mao’s principal obsession throughout the ‘50s was the recovery of Taiwan. No sooner was the Korean armistice in place than the hegemon ordered the PLA to begin preparing for final battle of the Chinese civil war: the invasion of Taiwan. There was only one problem: the PLA invading force would have to cross the ninety-mile-wide Taiwan Strait, which was patrolled by the carriers and cruisers of the U.S. Seventh Fleet. Moreover, the Nationalist army was growing more formidable as a U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group helped to train and equip its expanding ranks.

On August 14, 1954, China’s state-owned press issued a blistering denunciation of the “American imperialists” for their continued “occupation of Taiwan.” The island would be “liberated,” Beijing blustered, and by force if necessary.⁴⁴ Battle-hardened Communist divisions were moved to staging areas along the Fujian coast and MIGs appeared over the Taiwan Straits.

Chiang Kai-shek did not back down. He put the Nationalist army on alert and strengthened his garrisons on the offshore island groups his forces still controlled. Neither did the PRC’s bellicosity unnerve President Eisenhower. When the question of Communist China’s war preparations came up at a press conference on August 17, he replied that he had recently reaffirmed standing orders to the U.S. Seventh Fleet to defend Taiwan against any attack. “Any invasion of Formosa,” the former general remarked, referring to the island by its Portuguese name, “would have to run over the Seventh Fleet.”⁴⁵

Deterred from launching a full-scale attack on Taiwan, the Communists shifted their attention to the offshore islands. Chief among these were the Dazhens, located midway between Shanghai and Keelung; the Mazus, ten miles off the port of Fuzhou and opposite the northern end of Taiwan; and the Jinmens (Quemoys), two miles off the port of Xiamen (Amoy). These islands had helped the Republic of China and the United States to maintain a fairly effective blockade of the South China coast, and had also served as intelligence-gathering posts and commando bases. Both Chiang and Mao regarded these islands as stepping stones. Mao was as eager to capture the offshore islands preparatory to an invasion of Taiwan as Chiang was to employ them as staging areas for what he imagined would be the eventual recapture of the mainland.⁴⁶

On September 3, the Chinese Communists began an intense artillery bombardment of Jinmen and Little Jinmen. The Nationalist air force responded by bombing Communist artillery positions on the mainland. Fearing that an invasion was imminent, the Nationalist government requested U.S. aid. Eisenhower, however, preferred to wait until an actual assault materialized and it could be seen whether the landing was limited in scope or preliminary to one on Taiwan. His position—defend Taiwan but not the offshore islands—was shortly to be written into the Mutual Defense Treaty of December 2, 1954.⁴⁷

Taking Eisenhower’s wait-and-see attitude as a signal that the Americans would not intervene, the Chinese Communists assaulted the northernmost island in the Dazhen chain, a place called I-Jiang Shan, on January 20, 1955. The garrison force of 720 soldiers died to the last man defending the tiny island. Convinced that the two remaining Dazhen islands were indefensible, Eisenhower pressured Chiang Kai-shek to abandon the chain, offering the U.S. Seventh Fleet to cover the evacuation of the 20,000 civilians and 11,000 Nationalist soldiers stationed there. Chiang reluctantly gave way, withdrawing the last of his forces on February 6, 1955.

At the same time, Eisenhower warned the Chinese Communists that the United States would resist an attack on the remaining offshore islands, with nuclear weapons if necessary. To further clarify the American position, Eisenhower asked Congress on January 25 to pass a resolution authorizing him “to assure the security of Formosa and the Pescadores” and, if need be, other “closely related localities” which he did not identify. This resolution, which passed on February 26, convincingly demonstrated to Beijing that the American president and Congress were united in their intention to resist further attacks on Nationalist-held territory. It emphatically underlined the importance of the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty, which had been ratified by the Senate just a few weeks before. Not only was Taiwan an indispensable link in the chain of U.S. mutual security agreements ringing Communist China, but the defensive perimeter of the treaty itself was in effect extended to the offshore islands.⁴⁸ The use of force had given the Communists nothing except an insignificant chain of islands. Faced with a virtual promise of heavy U.S. retaliation in the event of any further attacks, Mao shifted course. It was a textbook example of how the strategy of “escalation dominance” could be effectively utilized.⁴⁹ The shelling of Jinmen and Mazu came to an abrupt halt, as did the feverish preparations for an assault on the islands. The ever-genial Zhou Enlai arrived at the Bandung Conference, held in Indonesia in April 1955, bearing an olive branch: the PRC was willing to sit down with the United States at the negotiating table to discuss ways to ease cross-strait tension.⁵⁰

By the end of May, an informal ceasefire held on the Taiwan Strait. Talks between the United States and the PRC began in Geneva and dragged on for months. Washington repeatedly pressed for a joint renunciation of the use of force in the Taiwan area. Beijing balked at this, favoring instead a toothless pronouncement on world peace, and this only in exchange for ministerial-level talks. Seventy-three sessions were held in all, but the impasse went on. No formal armistice was ever reached, nor did Beijing agree—then or ever—to renounce the use of force.⁵¹

Instead, traditional Chinese truculence reasserted itself. The Chinese Communists continued building up their military establishment opposite Taiwan and constructed a number of new airfields. In the face of this militancy, the United States in 1957 deployed Matador surface-to-surface missiles, capable of carrying nuclear weapons, to Taiwan. Construction began on a major air base near Taichung, in central Taiwan, with a runway long enough to accommodate B-52 strategic bombers. The ROC fortified the offshore islands and reinforced the garrisons stationed there.

When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first space satellite, in 1957, Mao saw it as proof that the Communist bloc had surged ahead of the United States, and he was eager to press its newly won strategic advantage. Following a meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in Beijing, he suddenly unleashed a fierce bombardment on Jinmen on August 23, 1958. Tens of thousands of artillery rounds rained down on the island while Communist jets launched strafing attacks. Offshore, torpedo boats attacked Nationalist convoy and transport ships. On August 29, Radio Beijing announced that an amphibious landing on Jinmen was imminent. The 100,000-man Nationalist garrison on the island was on alert as PRC torpedo boats continued swarming about the island and gunners concentrated their fire on Jinmen’s landing beach and airstrip, rendering them unusable. But the threat of invasion had been a feint: the real intent had been to impose a blockade. It was only a matter of time before the garrison force, deprived of reinforcements and supplies from Taiwan, would be starved out.

Eisenhower, realizing that the PRC’s ultimate objective remained the capture of Taiwan itself, publicly warned the regime not to attempt an invasion of the offshore islands. “Let us suppose that the Chinese Communists conquer Quemoy,” he remarked in a radio address. “Would that be the end of the story?. . .They frankly say that their present military effort is part of a program to conquer Formosa. . . . [T]his plan would liquidate all of the free world positions in the Western Pacific.”⁵² To demonstrate its commitment to the defense of Taiwan, the United States immediately shipped a host of modern weapons to the island. Further underlining U.S. resolve, Nationalist Chinese and American Marines, on September 8, staged a large-scale amphibious landing on southern Taiwan.

Meanwhile, the blockade of Jinmen had continued for two weeks, until on September 7 a convoy of Nationalist supply ships, escorted by warships of the U.S. Seventh Fleet and the ROC Navy, steamed directly for the beleaguered island. The U.S. naval squadron escorted the supply ships to a point three nautical miles from Jinmen, then stood off while they continued on to land and unload their cargo. The commander of the U.S. squadron had permission to return fire if fired upon, but the Communist guns were silent. Mao had blinked.⁵³

Still, Beijing’s bizarre behavior persisted. An “even-day” ceasefire was announced on October 25 and gradually became a regular part of island life. On even days, convoys could arrive without being challenged; on odd days, the attacks continued, but with diminishing intensity. The Taiwan press condemned this as a cruel game. Eisenhower called it a Gilbert and Sullivan war.

Eventually the Taiwan Strait crisis passed. The Eisenhower-Dulles policy of facing down Communist aggression wherever it might occur, along with the resolve of the Nationalist government, had prevailed. At the same time, the failure of the Great Leap Forward and the ensuing famine, along with unrest in Tibet, may have turned the attention of the Communists to their growing domestic problems for a while.⁵⁴ Although the artillery bombardments would continue sporadically for decades afterward, the Chinese Communists have never again challenged the government of the Republic of China on Taiwan over the offshore islands.⁵⁵

BLOODY BORDERS

Because of its peace-loving rhetoric, the People’s Republic of China has largely avoided the reputation for bellicosity that it deserves for its history of aggression against peoples on its periphery. In the first few decades of its existence, the PRC intervened in Korea, assaulted and absorbed Tibet, supported guerilla movements throughout Southeast Asia, attacked India, fomented an insurrection in Indonesia, provoked border clashes with the Soviet Union, and instigated repeated crises vis-à-vis Taiwan. The latest incarnation of Chinese hegemony was behaving very much according to type.

When an opportunity arose to send out China’s legions, Mao and his successors generally did not hesitate—especially if the crises involved a former tributary state, which is to say almost all of the countries with which China has a common border. Although the PRC is not as well known for its militarism as the Islamic states, it has far more often resorted to violence in settling international disputes. Up to 1987, China had employed violence in fully 76.9 percent of its international crises. The comparable figure for the Muslim states was 53.5 percent. China’s propensity for violence is even more striking when compared with the Soviet Union (28.5 percent), the United States (17.9 percent) and the United Kingdom (11.5 percent). China, in scholar Samuel Huntington’s phrase, has “bloody borders.”⁵⁶

The last two decades of the twentieth century were not as conflict-ridden as the earlier three decades of the PRC’s existence, as Deng Xiaoping followed his own advice and “bided his time”, concentrating on China’s economic development. Nevertheless, the world saw China use force against India, Vietnam, and the Philippines during this period. And while contemporary Chinese thinkers continue to explain that China’s exceptional civilization will make the PRC a peaceful and harmonious superpower, when they are probed for details it turns out that in their view even extreme violence qualifies as “peaceful” in the service of the new world order that China is so eager to establish.⁵⁷ China’s history is replete with examples of how nations and peoples that were not eager to join the Sinocentric world have been “harmonized” and “pacified” until they did.

All in the name of the Great Harmony, of course.