China’s Search for Security

China’s foreign policy during the Cold War (conventionally dated 1946–1991) shifted dramatically more or less every decade. Upon coming to power, the new government’s chairman, Mao Zedong, announced his decision to “lean to one side,” allying China with the Soviet Union and isolating it from the West. Eleven years later, in 1960, however, Mao split with the Soviet Union, positioning China between the two superpowers as dual enemies. In 1972, by inviting Richard Nixon to China, he activated what came to be called the “strategic triangle,” in which China was the swing player between the two superpowers. After another ten years, Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, announced in 1982 an “independent foreign policy of peace,” under which China distanced itself from both superpowers without severing ties with either. In 1989, Deng “normalized” relations with Moscow, which led eventually to closer cooperation with post-Communist Russia, even while Beijing also intensified its ties with the West through globalization.

Such unstable alignments may seem to challenge our thesis that foreign policy is largely a response to geostrategic conditions. After all, factors such as geography and demography change slowly. If geostrategic realism makes sense, then policy should evolve slowly, too. In addition, China’s leaders—especially Mao—articulated the rationale for China’s policy shifts in strong ideological terms, which they doubtless believed. Yet the puzzle of frequent policy change can best be resolved by focusing on the shifting strategies of the two superpowers as they struggled to leverage China to their own advantage and China’s responding efforts to preserve its autonomy. The intensity of superpower competition over China was in turn due to a permanent feature of China’s situation that we noted in chapter 1: its hinge position between the Eurasian continent and the Pacific Ocean and thus, in the Cold War, between the camps of the East and the West.

Ever since the age of European expansion, China had lain on the strategic frontier, where global forces tried to control it but failed. From the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, when European powers colonized much of the world, they established beachheads around the edges of China but did not conquer the vast hinterland. During World War II, Japan occupied parts of northern, eastern, and southern China, but only with difficulty and only for about six years. In the post–World War II era, the American informal empire in Asia reached its limit at the edge of China. After the defeat of the American-allied KMT in the Chinese civil war that followed World War II, Washington withdrew to a new Free World “defensive perimeter” that ran, as Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously said in a January 1950 speech, “along the Aleutians to Japan and then to the Ryukyus … [and] from the Ryukyus to the Philippine Islands”—in other words, a perimeter that excluded not only China, but also Korea and Taiwan.¹ Meanwhile, the Soviet Union under Stalin tried to extend its influence over China, but—as we detail in this chapter—was unable to turn China into a reliable ally. As in previous centuries, China remained independent even when it was weak.

Both Cold War superpowers presented potential threats to China, but of the two the Soviet Union was the closer and more demanding. Moscow needed Chinese cooperation to realize its strategic vision, whereas the Americans cared chiefly to deny the Chinese asset to the Soviets. The twists and turns of Chinese policy during the Cold War evolved as a series of attempts first to live within the embrace of the Soviet Union and then to fend it off, against the background of U.S. policies that were purposely designed to intensify those very conflicts between the communist powers. In this way, for three and a half decades the Soviet threat, first potential and then actual, was the pivot of Chinese foreign policy. By focusing on China’s relations with the Soviet Union, we can review the history of PRC foreign policy from the beginning to the end of the Cold War.

When the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed, the U.S. rather than Russia became China’s primary security threat. Chinese policymakers seized the opportunity to put Sino–Russian relations on a cooperative footing that they hoped would serve Chinese interests for a long time to come.

Mao Zedong announced in June 1949, shortly before the Communist victory in the civil war, that China “must lean either to the side of imperialism or to the side of socialism. Sitting on the fence will not do, nor is there a third road.”² As his forces moved south, they engaged in what he called “sweeping the courtyard before welcoming guests,” carrying out a series of sometimes violent moves against Western diplomats and missionaries that made the point that new China would accept relations with the West only on equal terms. These incidents forced the U.S. State Department to abandon a plan it was considering to establish diplomatic relations with the PRC.³ In February 1950, Beijing signed a Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance with Moscow, and eight months later, in October 1950, China intervened in the Korean War, which led to direct combat between Chinese and U.S. military forces.

This series of events not only set U.S.–China antagonism in stone for the next two decades but left two legacies that are still unresolved today. President Harry S. Truman’s interposition of the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait in response to the outbreak of the Korean War created a problem that would almost certainly otherwise not still exist more than half a century later—the “Taiwan issue” (chapters 4 and 8). Also still unresolved over six decades later is the peace in Korea. Although fighting ended with an armistice in 1953, a peace treaty has yet to be signed, and there is still no formal diplomatic recognition of North Korea by South Korea or the U.S. Protracted tensions and serial crises continue on the peninsula (chapter 5).

Historians have debated whether the U.S. lost a chance in the late 1940s to build a cooperative relationship with the PRC. Late in World War II and during the Chinese civil war, there was some fluidity in the CCP’s orientation to foreign powers. Likewise, Washington was disillusioned with Chiang Kai-shek on one side of the civil war, and Moscow was often disloyal to the CCP on the other. Washington sent the U.S. Army Observer Group (the Dixie Mission) to Yan’an, and Zhou Enlai sent some private probes to U.S. ambassador John Leighton Stuart, but these feelers did not change the basic facts. The CCP correctly viewed Washington as committed to anticommunism, and Washington correctly perceived the CCP as committed to socialism and antagonistic to Western privileges in China. It is difficult to imagine that under those conditions the two countries could have formed an alliance or even an alignment. At most, China might have put itself into a more equidistant relationship between the two powers, as it eventually did a little more than two decades later. Events instead led to a sharp polarization of relations between Beijing and Washington.

The Soviet Union provided the most obvious model and useful advice for dealing with such a wide range of domestic political challenges, all the more so as the CCP leaders had looked to Moscow for inspiration since the founding of their party in 1921. The PRC set up a Soviet-style governing structure that provided for overall control by the CCP (chapter 2). It patterned its constitution, adopted in 1954, on the 1936 Soviet Constitution adopted under Stalin. It learned from the Soviets how to set up a central party apparatus to run a government rather than a war; how to manage government ministries; how to create a system of courts, procurators, police, and jails; how to embed political security functions into factories, universities, offices, and other work units; how to set up Soviet-style mass organizations; and how to use the network of newspaper reporters around the country as a supplementary intelligence service. Even the mere fact of the Soviet alliance showed the party’s domestic enemies that the regime had powerful international support. Soviet socialism appeared, however briefly, to be the key to the national salvation that Chinese had long sought.

A second reason to lean to one side was the need for defense against an American strategy of “containment and isolation” that had begun to take shape even before the end of the Chinese civil war. In Japan, the U.S. started as early as 1948 to reverse its original intent to disarm its former enemy. Now Washington aimed to rebuild Japan’s military potential so it could serve as an ally in the emerging Cold War. The so-called reverse course included canceling reparations, negotiating a Mutual Defense Treaty, establishing U.S. bases on Japanese territory, and constructing a major American naval and air base on the island of Okinawa, which the U.S. kept under its direct control until the island’s reversion to Japanese sovereignty in 1972. The complex of American bases remains on Okinawa to this day.

The U.S. ringed China with threats on every side. The CIA provided millions of dollars in covert support and military training for Tibetan guerrillas resisting the imposition of Chinese rule. The U.S. government conducted or assisted covert activities against China from Taiwan, Thailand, Burma, and Laos. After the Korean War ended, the U.S. created a web of treaty arrangements covering much of Asia, including the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), which joined the U.S., Thailand, the Philippines, Pakistan, Australia, New Zealand, France, and the United Kingdom; the Australia, New Zealand, United States (ANZUS) Alliance; and the Central Treaty Organization involving the U.S., the United Kingdom, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan. The U.S. established alliances and/or military assistance programs bilaterally with many countries around China, including Thailand, South Vietnam, and the Philippines. In 1954, it also signed a Mutual Defense Treaty with Chiang Kai-shek’s ROC government in Taipei.

To isolate the PRC diplomatically, the U.S. and most of its allies withheld recognition from it and treated the ROC in Taiwan as the legitimate government of all China. The key exceptions were Britain, which recognized China in 1950 because it needed diplomatic ties with Beijing in order to manage its colony in Hong Kong, and France, which switched diplomatic recognition from the ROC to the PRC in 1964 as part of its pursuit of an independent foreign policy under Charles de Gaulle.⁴ With Western support, the ROC continued to occupy the China seat in the UN. U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles said that he expected the Communist government in China to fall and that Washington should encourage this demise through “peaceful evolution.” Mao took such comments seriously.⁵

Twice the U.S. publicly threatened the use of nuclear weapons against China. During the 1952 presidential campaign and in early 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said he would use tactical nuclear weapons if necessary to end the war in Korea. Washington again threatened to use nuclear weapons in 1954 to end the first Taiwan Strait crisis. In 1957, the U.S. deployed Matador surface-to-surface tactical nuclear missiles in Taiwan.

China’s mutual defense pact with Moscow anticipated such threats. It called for the Soviet Union to provide “military and other assistance” to China should it be attacked by Japan “or any state allied with her.” Because Japan was under American occupation, lacking foreign policy or defense autonomy, there could be no mistaking that the U.S. was the ultimate target of the pledge.

Third, the Soviet alliance helped China economically. The new regime had to repair an economy devastated by years of invasion and civil war. But its ambitions were larger. It aimed to modernize the backward, predominantly agrarian economy, to build the industrial basis for a powerful military, and to provide the people with a prosperous socialist way of life—all at high speed. The Chinese Communists believed that Stalin had shown the way to carry out just such a process of forced development: he had used coercion and state planning to squeeze capital out of a backward peasantry, to mobilize a vast labor force, and to direct investment into national needs. In this way, he had created a world-class heavy industrial sector in the space of a generation, catapulting the Soviet Union to the status of a world power with advanced weaponry, including nuclear weapons.

To the Chinese Communists—and to many non-Communist intellectuals in China and the West in the 1940s and 1950s—the Soviet experience seemed to prove that socialist planning, not capitalism, was the royal road to escape from backwardness.⁶ Just as in Russia, the Communist leaders in China believed that a big agricultural surplus was being wasted in luxury consumption by landlords and rich peasants, which the state could seize by collectivizing agriculture. At the same time, the reorganization of inefficient small-scale agricultural production would promote a surge in output. Mao therefore moved to collectivize agriculture, and he set up Soviet-style economic-planning agencies and industrial ministries to invest the anticipated surplus in new industries.

Meanwhile, the West had imposed an economic embargo as part of the policy of containment and isolation.⁷ Even though the Soviet Union could afford only limited help because of the damage done to its own economy in World War II, it provided key loans and technical assistance. During Mao’s 1950 visit to Moscow to arrange for the Mutual Defense Treaty, Stalin agreed to China’s request for a five-year $300 million loan. The loan would be instrumental in building fifty key industrial and infrastructural projects devoted to the recovery and modernization of Chinese heavy industry, defense industry, and energy production. Later agreements brought the total number of Soviet-aided projects to 156 and the total value of Soviet loans to $430 million. Although by today’s standards the amount of the loans may appear ungenerous—and the Soviets did not supply any grants-in-aid—these loans were crucial to the success of China’s First Five-Year Plan (1953–1957), which laid the basis for the country’s industrial economy. Equally important, the Soviets sent some ten thousand planners and technicians to help set up the Chinese bureaucracy and design the projects.⁸

The fourth reason for the PRC’s decision to ally with the Soviet Union was the need to be on good terms with a potentially threatening neighbor. Russia had a long history of involving itself in Chinese affairs and a leader, Josef Stalin, known for his ruthlessness. In the 1920s, Moscow had assisted the Nationalist revolution while also guiding the formation of the rival CCP. In the late 1930s, the USSR was a major outside supplier for Nationalist China in the war against Japan, sending weapons, military supplies, and “volunteer” pilots to China. At the same time, Stalin meddled frequently in CCP affairs, sending instructions, at times supporting Mao’s rivals, and maintaining a “Bolshevik faction” in the CCP to report on and pressure Mao. At the end of World War II, when the Nationalist government seemed likely to survive, Stalin gave only weak help to the CCP in its struggle with the KMT.⁹

But once the Communists came to power, Stalin sought maximum influence in Beijing. Secret protocols to the Mutual Defense Treaty granted Moscow the right to transport troops over a railway it had formerly controlled on Chinese territory and to ship military equipment to a Chinese port it had formerly controlled, Lüshun, without having to notify Chinese authorities. The protocols also prohibited China from allowing any non-Soviet foreign business activity in Xinjiang and the three northeastern provinces. Stalin encouraged Mao to enter the Korean War but delayed in fulfilling his promise to provide Soviet planes and pilots until he was confident the U.S. would not retaliate against the USSR. He sent weapons and equipment to Chinese forces in Korea but required China to pay for nearly everything it received. Throughout these events, Mao remained anxious to demonstrate his loyalty to Stalin. He even invited the master to send an ideological expert to review his selected writings for any lapses before their publication, an inspection they fortunately passed.¹⁰

The armistice in Korea ushered in a short period of optimism for PRC leaders. China had bloodied the Americans, many of the regime’s domestic enemies had been cowed or killed, and the industrial economy was growing at a rate of 18 percent a year. On balance, the Soviet alliance seemed to have been a good decision.

First, Mao began to see the Soviet relationship as a threat rather than a benefit to internal security. Stalin died in 1953. In 1956, his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, gave a secret speech to the Twentieth Soviet Party Congress exposing Stalin’s crimes and denouncing his cult of personality. Khrushchev’s apostasy indirectly called into question the legitimacy of Mao’s policies because the latter were modeled in so many respects on Stalin’s. And his speech undermined Mao’s authority because Mao was just in the process of establishing his own cult of personality as a way of consolidating his control of the CCP and the party’s control of China. Khrushchev had not told even his own comrades, much less foreign Communist leaders, what he was going to say. His failure to consult Beijing led Mao to conclude that Khrushchev would not take the interests of his Chinese colleagues into account in his future decisions. Also, with the influx of Soviet advisers to China and the frequent visits by top Chinese to Moscow, Mao feared the buildup of a pro-Soviet faction within the CCP and the government. In 1954, he purged two high-ranking colleagues, Gao Gang and Rao Shushi, accusing them of being Soviet agents. In 1959, he purged Marshal Peng Dehuai for speaking in opposition to the Great Leap Forward and for being too close to Moscow.

Second, toward the mid-1950s, Soviet priorities on relations toward the U.S. began to diverge from China’s. Khrushchev introduced the doctrines of “peaceful coexistence” between the socialist and capitalist worlds and “peaceful transition” from capitalism to socialism. He hoped that by slowing the arms race and forswearing violent revolution, he could buy time for the socialist camp to settle its internal differences, stabilize its regimes and borders, and catch up with the West in economic and military strength. This objective became even more urgent following upheavals in the satellite states of Poland and Hungary in 1956. Washington responded favorably to Moscow’s interest in détente but kept up the pressure on China in hopes of driving a “wedge” between the two allies.¹¹

In 1957, after the Soviets launched a space satellite ahead of the U.S., Mao proclaimed that the “east wind prevails over the west wind,” meaning that the Communist bloc was now stronger than the Western bloc and should be able to roll back U.S. global influence. At conferences of the international socialist camp, China urged the Soviet Union to behave more forcefully.¹² Yet in 1959, to Mao’s displeasure, Khrushchev visited the U.S. presidential retreat at Camp David, seeking to reduce tensions with President Eisenhower. Soviet policy on the interlinked issues of nuclear cooperation and Taiwan further estranged the two capitals. In 1957, Moscow had promised to assist China in developing nuclear weapons by providing a sample bomb and missiles as well as technical information.¹³ The idea was that possession of these weapons would enable China to resist American nuclear blackmail, thus reducing the need for direct Soviet involvement in any future Sino–American crises. But within a year Moscow began to worry that sharing nuclear technology with China would cripple its negotiations with the U.S. on a limited test ban treaty, so it started to drag its heels in fulfilling its promises. In 1958, Mao launched the second Taiwan Strait crisis by ordering artillery barrages against two offshore islands held by the ROC without first informing Moscow, even though Khrushchev had just been visiting Beijing. Moscow verbally supported China’s claim to Taiwan but feared that Chinese “adventurism” might drag the Soviet Union into war with the U.S. Khrushchev kept silent on the Taiwan crisis until it was over and soon formally canceled the nuclear agreement. When Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963, China charged that the two superpowers were colluding to deny nonnuclear states the means to defend their national sovereignty. Also at this time, Khrushchev withheld support in China’s brewing border conflict with India, with which Moscow was developing a cooperative military and diplomatic relationship. When the border dispute led to the Sino–Indian war in 1962, Moscow verbally sided with India, the first time a Communist state had broken ranks with an ally in a war.

Third, the Chinese developed misgivings about the Soviet economic model. Despite agricultural collectivization, by the mid-1950s the proceeds from forced grain sales and the grain tax fell short of what the leaders had expected. They were also displeased with the bottlenecks in transport, energy, and construction materials that emerged as a consequence of rapid industrialization and with the inability of the Soviet-style planning apparatus to overcome these bottlenecks. Mao pushed the formation of a new kind of more regimented and larger rural collective (“people’s communes”) that he thought would spur production and improve the government’s ability to get control over rural output. And he pushed factory managers to produce beyond plan quotas by any means possible, even if doing so caused “imbalances” that upset the planners. As an additional benefit, Mao’s new development strategy did away with the influence of the managers and technicians with pro-Soviet sentiments. The Soviet advisers cautioned against Mao’s experiments, partially out of self-interest because the communes made it look as if China was “entering communism” before the Soviet elder brother. But he forged ahead, launching the Great Leap Forward, a breakthrough development push that through a set of mistakes eventually caused an estimated 45 million deaths from hunger.¹⁴

Fourth, Mao perceived Khrushchev’s policies as more directly threatening to Chinese security than Stalin’s. In 1958, Khrushchev proposed to build long-range radio facilities on Chinese soil to enable Moscow to communicate with its Pacific Fleet. Moscow later suggested basing what it called a “joint” flotilla of nuclear-powered submarines in China, even though China had no submarines. Such arrangements were not unusual in the context of a military alliance, but Mao interpreted them as proposals to establish Soviet bases on Chinese territory. Meeting with Soviet ambassador Pavel Yudin, he railed, “Yesterday you made me so enraged that I could not sleep at all last night…. [We] will not satisfy you at all, not even give you a tiny [piece of our] finger.”¹⁵ When Khrushchev visited Beijing later that year, Mao accused him of encroaching on Chinese sovereignty and seeking to “take away all our coastal areas.” He warned the Soviet leader, “We have already driven away the British, Japanese, and other foreigners who stayed on our soil for a long time. Comrade Khrushchev, I’ll repeat it for the last time. We will never again allow anyone to use our land to achieve their own purposes.”¹⁶

For all these reasons, Mao feuded with Khrushchev both in private meetings and in a variety of coded public statements and communiqués. In 1960, the Sino–Soviet split went public. Without warning, Khrushchev withdrew the Soviet advisers from China. Chinese media published denunciations of what they called “modern revisionists,” clearly referring to Khrushchev. Starting in 1963, Mao issued a long series of polemics that excoriated Moscow’s supposed betrayal of socialism, assailed the Soviet Union’s credentials as the leader of the socialist bloc, and mocked Khrushchev’s standing as a Marxist–Leninist. He positioned himself as the senior interpreter of Marxism–Leninism in the socialist camp and the defender of orthodoxy against Stalin’s revisionist successors. The Chinese labeled the Soviet Union’s attempt to dominate its alliance partners as “hegemonism” and devised the insulting concept of “social imperialism” to describe Moscow’s efforts to gain influence in other countries. Mao’s critique of the Soviet model became the ideological basis for the Cultural Revolution, which attacked a “capitalist class within the party” and promoted “uninterrupted revolution.” The split made China the enemy of both superpowers at once.

Second, Soviet security planners saw Russia’s expansive, thinly populated Soviet Far Eastern region as an exposed target for Chinese encroachment. A pretext for attack existed so long as China disputed long stretches of the existing borders, denouncing as unfair the “unequal treaties” under which imperial China had ceded hundreds of thousands of square miles of territory to Russia. Third, China’s defection made it more expensive for the Soviets to balance the U.S. military position in Asia. Moscow spent enormous sums building its Pacific Fleet based in Vladivostok into its largest fleet, designed to put pressure on the U.S. and its ally Japan, without the benefit of access to Chinese ports. Fourth, in 1964 China joined the club of nuclear states with a successful test explosion, having continued its nuclear weapons program on its own after the withdrawal of Soviet support. Moscow feared that these new arms would increase the Chinese willingness to confront the Soviet Union. Fifth and most nightmarish—although at the time seeming unlikely—was the thought of Beijing’s cooperating in any way with Washington.

Brezhnev increased the forces deployed in the Soviet Far East and Siberia from about twelve divisions in the early 1960s to more than fifty in the mid-1980s, mostly positioned directly on the Chinese border, some in the Mongolian People’s Republic next to China. The number of Soviet combat aircraft in the theater rose from about two hundred to some twelve hundred between the early 1960s and the mid-1970s. In addition, approximately fifty older SS-4 medium-range ballistic missiles and SS-5 intermediate-range ballistic missiles in the region were replaced by more than double the number of newer SS-11 variable-range ballistic missiles during the same period.¹⁷

The Soviet forces possessed several options. On the high end, they could launch a nuclear strike or a general ground invasion. More plausible scenarios were a limited nuclear strike on China’s nuclear weapons base in Xinjiang and selected industrial sites¹⁸ or a limited ground attack into industrial northeastern China employing tactical nuclear weapons, which were favored in Soviet military doctrine. China’s military had no defense against such threats except a “people’s war” (chapter 11).

Chinese anxiety concerning Soviet intentions reached a peak after Soviet-led Warsaw Pact armies invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968 to terminate the Prague Spring—an attempt to liberalize communism. Enunciating what came to be known as the “Brezhnev Doctrine,” the Soviet leader asserted Moscow’s right to intervene in any socialist state by force of arms to defend socialism against counterrevolution. Counterrevolution was exactly what Russian polemics for years had been accusing the Chinese of conducting.

Although poised, the Soviet forces did not strike China on a large scale. There were frequent border clashes in many locations. In Xinjiang, the Soviets encouraged ethnic unrest and probed the possibility of carving a breakaway buffer state out of Chinese territory, as they had attempted to do in the 1940s. A sizable battle broke out on the eastern part of the contested border in March 1969. The most widely accepted explanation is that Beijing decided to occupy a Soviet-claimed island in the Ussuri River (the Damansky in Russian, the Zhenbao in Chinese) to signal its resolve in the face of Soviet provocations.¹⁹ Soviet troops ousted the Chinese, inflicting eight hundred casualties; attacked Chinese troops elsewhere along the border, including in Xinjiang; and threatened nuclear attack. The Chinese blinked by inviting Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin to talks in Beijing to defuse the crisis.

Soviet deployments on the border were complemented by the diplomatic and military encirclement of China, undertaken as part of Moscow’s drive to increase its global influence. The Soviet Pacific Fleet grew to more than eighty principal surface combatants, including two aircraft carriers. It also included 120 submarines, 32 of them nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines.²⁰ It established a strong presence in the Sea of Okhotsk, the Sea of Japan, the South China Sea, the Strait of Malacca, and the Indian Ocean. To China’s east, Moscow increased military aid to win North Korea’s loyalty. To the south, Moscow tightened its relationship with North Vietnam, using military assistance to bring Hanoi to its side in the Sino–Soviet conflict. It also signed a Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation with India in 1971. Moscow’s open military pipeline to New Delhi fueled the modernization of the Indian armed forces, reducing China’s advantage along the contested border and sharpening Chinese anxieties about the security of Tibet, whose exiled ruler, the Dalai Lama, had taken refuge on Indian soil in 1959 (chapter 6). Later that year the Soviet-armed Indian army assisted the breakaway rebellion of Pakistan’s eastern province, which established the new nation of Bangladesh, thus weakening one of China’s few allies.

Meanwhile, the Americans remained firm in their policies of recognizing the ROC as the government of China and isolating the PRC. During 1963 negotiations with Moscow over the Limited Test Ban Treaty, Kennedy tried to interest Khrushchev in allowing U.S. military action to prevent the nearly-completed development of the Chinese nuclear weapon, but Khrushchev did not agree.²¹ In 1964, in anticipation of the Chinese nuclear bomb test, U.S. policymakers under Lyndon Johnson again considered bombing the Chinese test site. According to U.S. government documents declassified in 1998, CIA support to Tibetan exiles continued until 1972. The escalation of the U.S. military presence in Indochina posed an additional threat, with the possibility that the Americans would bomb or attack North Vietnam’s so-called sanctuaries in China.

China had no outside support. Beijing’s search for sympathizers took on an insurgent quality. Under the slogan “We have friends all over the world,” the PRC engaged in a mixture of people-to-people diplomacy, state visits for leaders of international Maoist splinter groups, and relations with odd-lot Third World dictators. The CCP’s International Liaison Department served as a second foreign ministry, managing relations with non-Soviet-aligned Communist parties in the Third World. Overall, China’s foreign policy in these years had an air of boastful self-confidence that others read as expansionist and aggressive, but that in reality masked weakness and isolation.

Nixon’s meetings with Mao and Zhou initiated the period of what Western strategists called the “strategic triangle.” The triangle was remarkable in two ways. First, it allowed a country that was poor, isolated, and unable to project military power beyond its borders—China—to become the third most important strategic actor in the world, playing a larger role than England, France, Germany, India, Japan, or any state other than the two superpowers. Only China had the strategic location and diplomatic flexibility to make itself consequential as a swing player. Second, this weakest of the three countries reaped the most benefits from tripolar diplomacy because it was the asset in play in the three-way game.²³ These benefits fell into three categories.

First, the triangle made China safe for the first time from both U.S. and Soviet attack. A series of developments eliminated any U.S. military threat to China. The transformation of China in American public opinion from a Red menace to a fascinating quasi-ally made it politically possible for Nixon to negotiate a face-saving withdrawal from the war in Vietnam. Beijing gave an assist by pressing Hanoi to accept the terms of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, which temporarily stopped the fighting. Regarding Taiwan, Nixon assured Mao that the U.S. would no longer promote independence or consider using the island as a base to attack China. The main U.S. military ally in Asia, Japan, moved quickly to establish diplomatic relations with China.

The Soviets responded at first by intensifying their military buildup around China. In 1978, a unified Vietnam entered a formal alliance with the Soviet Union and then invaded Cambodia, extending Moscow’s influence throughout Indochina. Soviet access to bases at Cam Ranh Bay and Danang enhanced Moscow’s ability to project naval and air power into the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. China mocked Hanoi’s role as Moscow’s junior partner, referring to Vietnam as a “small hegemonist.” China attempted to push back by aiding the Khmer Rouge. Then in 1979 Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan, a country sharing a short border with China and a long border with China’s ally Pakistan.

But China’s new tie with the U.S. became an effective deterrent to Soviet attack on China itself. The U.S. pullout from Vietnam freed resources to build up American and western European military assets that increased pressure on the Soviet Union. According to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s memoirs, when Brezhnev probed in 1973 to see how the U.S. would react to a Soviet attack on China, Kissinger replied that Washington would view such an attack as damaging to American interests.²⁴ When China attacked Soviet ally Vietnam in 1979, the U.S. again sent messages to Moscow to deter any Soviet military action against China.²⁵

Second, the opening to the U.S. allowed China to move from diplomatic isolation into the diplomatic mainstream. As soon as Nixon’s plan to visit China was announced, the UN General Assembly voted to take the China seat in the UN away from the ROC and give it to the PRC. Over the next few years, country after country switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing. The PRC replaced the ROC in a host of intergovernmental organizations ranging from the WHO to the Asian Development Bank, leaving Taiwan to scramble for other ways to participate in global affairs (chapter 9).

China could now begin to counterencircle Russia, seeking good relations with Soviet neighbors stretching from Japan through Iran to eastern and western Europe. China tacitly backed the U.S.–Japan security alliance while siding with Japan in its territorial dispute with Moscow over the Kuril Islands. China courted Germany’s Franz Josef Strauss, who warned about the danger of Soviet expansionism, and found fault with East Germany, one of Moscow’s staunchest allies. Beijing cheered efforts to strengthen the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), casting Europe’s pacifist Left as dupes influenced by the Kremlin’s propaganda. Seeking to exploit dissatisfaction with Moscow after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, China mended relations with Yugoslavia, whose leader, Marshal Josip Broz Tito, it had earlier reviled in the crudest terms.

Third, rapprochement opened the way for a breakout from economic isolation. China’s improved security situation allowed Premier Zhou Enlai to announce that military modernization was the last of four modernization priorities after industry, agriculture, and science and technology, and the end of hostility with the West meant that Western markets and capital were no longer off limits. Zhou’s vice premier Deng Xiaoping guided the first small steps in the economic opening to the West, thus establishing a precedent and some initial expertise for what became the full-scale embrace of globalization after Mao’s death.

China took advantage of this opening to pressure the new U.S. administration to distance itself further from Taiwan. It announced what it called “an independent foreign policy of peace,” signaling a move toward equidistance between Washington and Moscow, which helped persuade the U.S. to sign the 1982 Shanghai Communiqué, pledging a gradual reduction of arms sales to Taiwan in quantity and no increase in quality (chapter 4).

Toward Moscow, China responded cautiously. Deng demanded that the Soviet Union overcome what he called “three obstacles” before the two parties could normalize relations: the occupation of Afghanistan, troop deployments along the Sino–Soviet border and in Mongolia, and support for Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia. Each of these demands had a strategic rationale in terms of Chinese security, but at the same time each involved an important Soviet security commitment that appeared difficult to negotiate. By setting the bar so high, Beijing showed that it did not trust the Soviet Union and at the same time reassured Washington that it was in no hurry to come to terms with Moscow. Yet shifts in Soviet global strategy under Brezhnev’s successor Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985, produced progress on the three obstacles sooner than anyone expected.

Soviet troops had invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to prevent the collapse of Moscow’s client regime there. Afghanistan’s strategic significance to China derived less from its short shared border with Xinjiang Province than from its long borders with Pakistan and Iran, two states China valued as bulwarks against Soviet expansion. China believed that Moscow’s move into Afghanistan was part of the historic Russian push toward the South, foreshadowing increased pressure on Islamabad and Tehran to acquiesce in the expansion of Soviet influence. China also wanted to demonstrate its reliability as an ally to Pakistan and maintain solidarity with Washington at a time when the U.S. was pressing Moscow to withdraw SS-20 nuclear missiles from the border with China. Moscow had a great deal at stake in Afghanistan, yet it found itself losing the war there—in part because of U.S. and Chinese military aid to the Afghan resistance—and it made the hard decision to withdraw by 1989. The Afghanistan obstacle to Sino–Soviet normalization was thus eliminated.

Soviet troop deployments along the Sino–Soviet border and in Mongolia came under reconsideration as part of the “new thinking” that Gorbachev introduced into Soviet foreign policy to rectify what he viewed as the over-extension of Soviet military commitments. In July 1986, he announced a plan to reduce troop levels in Soviet Asia. The following year he withdrew a division of troops from Mongolia and began to remove SS-20 intermediate-range missiles from the Sino–Soviet border in accordance with a new treaty with the U.S. on the reduction of intermediate-range nuclear forces. In 1988, he further reduced the Soviet military presence along the border, and Beijing reciprocated with troop reductions of its own. The two countries also made progress on settling previously intractable border issues. By 1987, Moscow and Beijing had reached a preliminary agreement on the eastern part of the border. A number of border crossings reopened, and cross-border barter trade increased rapidly. In these ways, the second obstacle was surmounted.

China might have taken advantage of Russia’s weakness as the U.S. did. It instead sought to institutionalize cooperation on the basis of mutual interest so that Russia would be in the habit of cooperating with China when it recovered its strength in the future. Even in its weakened condition, Russia remained a significant power because of its vast territory, strategic location, natural resources, and advanced technology, including nuclear and space technology. Chinese policymakers believed these assets would bring about a resurgence of Russian power sooner or later. By building a relationship that served Russian as well as Chinese interests, Beijing hoped to create a lasting framework based on mutual attentiveness to one another’s security interests.

Beijing promptly gave recognition to all the post-Soviet successor states, despite the fact that the Chinese leaders considered as tragically mistaken the policies of Gorbachev and his successor, Boris Yeltsin, that had led to the emergence of these states.²⁶ They set aside their personal disdain for the undisciplined Yeltsin and ignored his unwelcome promotion of democracy in Russia in order to hold a series of seven summits with him during his eight years in office. In the March 1996 “Beijing Declaration,” the two sides announced a “strategic partnership.” Starting under Yeltsin’s successor Vladimir Putin in 2000, Sino–Russian summits became annual events. In July 2001, Jiang Zemin and Putin signed a Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation. Although not a mutual defense pact like the two countries’ 1950 accord, the treaty pledged cooperation in many fields of bilateral activity and laid down a common stance against American unilateralism, conveying the point with euphemisms such as “maintenance of global strategic balance” and “strict observation of universally acknowledged principles and norms of international laws.” China supported Russia in opposing NATO expansion and in rejecting Western condemnation of Russian human rights abuses in Chechnya.

Instead of trying to replace Russia as the dominant outside power in Central Asia, China hosted in 1996 the first of a series of annual summits that included Russia and the three Central Asian states contiguous to China—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. The five addressed China’s primary security concern in the region by agreeing to oppose what they called the “three evils of terrorism, separatism, and extremism” (the last referring to Islamic fundamentalism). This agreement assured Beijing that the neighboring states would not allow the region to be used as a base for Uyghur resistance to Chinese rule in Xinjiang. The states signed a series of agreements to demilitarize their borders by pulling troops back one hundred kilometers from the boundaries with China. They agreed not to target each other with missiles, to increase transparency in defense matters, and to give advance notice of military exercises. They set up military-to-military exchanges as well as bilateral and multilateral military exercises, including some antiterrorism exercises. In 2001, the five states, joined by Uzbekistan, formed the SCO. This framework assured China that it would not be excluded from Central Asia as Russian power recovered.

In the UN, China and Russia—sometimes along with France—cooperated to check the American impulse to intervene in trouble spots around the world. In 1999, they blocked Security Council approval for a military intervention in Kosovo, which therefore had to be carried out as a NATO instead of a UN operation. Both worked for an early lifting of UN sanctions on Iraq. They made it impossible to get a Security Council authorization for an invasion of Iraq in 2002, which then went ahead as what the U.S. called a “coalition of the willing.” The two blocked harsh sanctions on Sudan, Iran, and North Korea. These diplomatic efforts substantially delayed, limited, or in some cases prevented actions the U.S. wanted to take.

Trade soared in two areas: arms and oil. As China upgraded its military equipment in a big way starting in the 1990s, it needed to import high-end weaponry that it could not yet manufacture itself. Russia was the only country with the necessary level of technology that did not participate in the G7’s post-Tiananmen arms embargo against China. (As of 2012, the ban on high-technology arms sales to China by G7 countries was still in place.) Russia emerged as China’s main arms supplier, and China as Russia’s main arms buyer, based on transactions involving advanced fighter planes, submarines, and destroyers. Between 1990 and 2007, Russia sold approximately $15.8 billion in arms to China.²⁷ As Chinese defense industries became more advanced, however, Russian arms sales to China declined.

A second natural complementarity existed in the area of oil. At the same time that China shifted in the early 1990s from oil self-sufficiency to being a net oil importer, Russia’s oil and gas exports grew to become the world’s largest. China naturally turned to Russia for supplies. Oil imports from Russia climbed to 20 million tons in 2010. Yet Russia continued to rank behind Saudi Arabia, Angola, and Iran as an energy supplier to China for a mixture of reasons, among them price disputes, the unreliability of Russian supply, Japanese competition for Russian supplies, and lagging construction of a pipeline to supply natural gas.²⁸