Red China, The U.S.&The U.N.

In a time like ours—witnessing the revolutions of space, weaponry, automation, anticolonial nationalism and our own civil rights movement—the best foreign policy for America would have to possess an imaginativeness and self-confidence equal to so revolutionary an era. The core issue on which this imaginativeness can be tested is that of China—its claims, ambitions, expansionism, its view of the world and the world's view of it. Almost overnight, if it willed to do so, America could transform its own standing in the world by taking the lead in welcoming China into the world community of nations. Communist China today cannot enter into the potential world consensus because it is outside the community of nations. It is not part of the United Nations, nor of the disarmament talks and agencies, nor of the technical, scientific and cultural bodies through which the diverse intellectual currents of the world run and are interchanged.

There are two basic reasons why China must become part of this community. One is that if you continue to treat a nation as a pariah, it will remain a pariah and behave as one. China has the double sense of feeling at once superior to the rest of the world, because of its long history, its vast expanse and population and the past glories of its civilization, and also of feeling an outcast: As with the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet, the world is not its friend, nor is the world's law. There is no sure way of ending this outlaw status, especially if (as is sometimes charged) the outlaw nation wants to get into the world community only to wreck it more easily from the inside. But the stakes are so high that we must take the gamble, and bringing the outlaw into the circle of community will help allay the sense of estrangement on both sides.

The second reason is that, pariah or not, Communist China belongs in the UN and other world bodies simply as a matter of operational reality. In terms of de facto power, the rule of the Chinese government today extends over 700,000,000 people in a vast territorial expanse. The UN is not a gentlemen's club, but a community of operative de facto regimes. It is an assemblage of governments that do actually exercise power, and that therefore have the right, the responsibility and the need to belong to a world body that deliberates, debates and (in some areas) makes decisions on the great issues that shape the future.

The trend of opinion inside the UN has steadily been moving toward China's admittance and against the official American position of opposing it. In the last test (fall of 1965), the vote stood 47 to 47. Despite this trend, the hindrance to China's admission lies in two related factors. One is America's insistence that this is, within the meaning of the UN rules, an "important" question, which must therefore be settled by a two-thirds rather than a majority vote. The second is China's insistence on (continued on page 74)Red China (continued from page 71) setting a key condition for its admission—the simultaneous exclusion of the Republic of China, which is in reality the present government of Taiwan (formerly Formosa), the large island off the Chinese mainland to which Chiang Kai-shek and his aides fled when the Chinese revolution ousted them in 1949.

The issue of the simultaneous admittance of one member and expulsion of another member, involving not only membership in the UN but possession of one of the five permanent seats on the Security Council, is what makes the question "important" and the two-thirds-vote requirement a reasonable one. Given the 94 UN votes, which were split evenly in the last test, and not counting the abstentions, it will need a shift of 16 votes in order to get the necessary two-thirds vote of 63 to 31. Since it is highly unlikely that China will make things smoother by changing its rigid control over the sponsoring resolution and its wording, the problem will have to be taken out of the struggle over legalisms in the United Nations, and will have to be transferred to the larger reaches of Chinese and American diplomatic policy. Either China will have to become more flexible and relax the conditions it has set for admission, or America will have to shift its stance—or both.

The American stance is based essentially on the argument that China, by its past actions, has shown that it is not qualified for membership according to the intent of the UN Charter. (Article I: "respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples"; Article II: the members "shall refrain ... from the threat or use of force"; Article IV: "Membership in the United Nations is open to all other peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained in the present charter.") The American position is that China does not respect the rights of other peoples, has not refrained from the threat and use of force and is not a "peace-loving state."

There are two ways of meeting this charge. One is to ask how some of the present UN members have measured up to these high standards. This query could be raised, for example, about Egypt, which has been pretty rough toward its neighbors, and which has been accused at times not only of aggression but even of plots against the heads of neighboring states. It could be raised about Indonesia, which has leveled war against the newly created state of Malaysia. (The fact that Indonesia has recently left the UN does not affect its acts while a member.) It could be raised about Cuba, which has many times been accused of covert intervention in the internal affairs of Latin-American states. It could be raised about the Soviet Union, particularly in the way in which its tanks crushed the Nagy regime in Hungary in 1956. And it could be raised about America itself, which sent troops to Santo Domingo to prevent a regime from emerging whose anticommunism it doubted, and which has for years been carrying on an undeclared war in Vietnam. Actually, there are few members of the UN whose records could endure a rigorous scrutiny under the criteria of the Charter. If, indeed, the UN is to be viewed as a gentlemen's club, then it is one with few gentlemen in it.

This does not mean that the UN is a tissue of sham and cant. It means only that its members function not in a paper world but in a real world of tension and conflict, of claims and counterclaims, of cold wars and even some hot ones. The UN Charter does make provision for the expulsion of members who have violated its terms, but thus far none of the violations have been so gross as to invoke expulsion. Clearly the operative principle among the UN members has been the belief that an austere purity of action is less important than face-to-face confrontation and debate and a thrashing out of differences among the member states. There has also been a prevailing feeling that the UN should aim at the principle of "universality": that so far as possible every functioning sovereign state, no matter how minute its power or population, and whatever its ideological base, should be included in the world community.

Why not apply a similar principle of political realism to China? True, there is an ideological aggressiveness and an expansionism at the core of that behavior. But why have the Chinese behaved as they have? The reasons are partly rooted in Chinese nationalism, partly in doctrine. The Chinese have a great pride in their history and culture, and bitter memories of their recent past when they were manipulated and humiliated by the great powers of the West. Their resurgent nationalism is in large part a response to that experience. They aim to be second to none in Asia. In a world in which both America and the Soviet Union have carved out vast power masses, the Chinese see the rest of Asia as their sphere of influence.

The Chinese rulers today are also militant Communists who carry their doctrine with the fervor of a political religion that has not yet lost its fire of belief. Inside the world Communist camp, as well as in Asia, they aim to be second to none, not even to the Soviet Union. They are convinced that the Russians have allowed their special national interests and their fear of a nuclear war to tame their militancy as Communists. They see America as a menacing expansionist power, occupying the world's central urban area, bent not only on preserving the status quo but on reversing the historic revolutionary tide that they feel has been flowing toward a Communist world ever since the Russian Revolution of 1917. They are confident that, despite America's urban technology and economic power, there is a countervailing force which world communism can call upon and count upon—the force of rural revolutionary nationalism, operating through guerrilla wars, much as the Chinese revolution did. They see their own global role as one of keeping this force moving and mounting in strength until they themselves—the Chinese—have built a nuclear force that can match those of America and Russia, and a technological and economic base strong enough to hold it.

It is idle to argue about how wrong or right the Chinese are in this world view. What counts is that they have a world view of their own, just as the Russians do, and one more explicit than that of the Americans or the French. The Chinese base their present behavior and their future expectations upon the power principle. But that, too, does not make exceptions of them. One could argue persuasively that the operation of the power principle has become an extremely dangerous one in a world of overkill weapons. But today it is the Americans and the Russians who have the predominance in these weapons, not the Chinese. The logic of their foreign policy is in their effort to find and exploit a power principle that will counterbalance the weapons. They have it in part in their vast land armies, which they have used to apply pressure upon neighboring states. Even more, they have it in the nationalist guerrilla movements they nourish and, when convenient, initiate.

By encouraging and supporting these movements where they exist, and by stirring them up where they don't, the Chinese have found a powerful weapon in their double struggle against the American camp and the Soviet camp. Their doctrinal position, as the self-proclaimed exclusive heirs of Marxism-Leninism, is a congenial one for them to take, but it is also a useful one in developing a power leverage against their rivals and enemies. In time they may change their doctrine, and probably will. In their present phase there is an impressive interlocking of their nationalist aims, their ideological strategy and their global power politics. One may call this "lawlessness," as American spokesmen in the UN have done. But to dismiss it with a label is to miss much of its larger meaning in the present phase of contending world forces, and certainly achieves nothing but the coalescing of unrealistic attitudes around a slogan.

It would be merely innocent to ignore (continued on page 158)(continued from page 74) the hurts that the Chinese have inflicted by their pressures and expansionism. They have kept India in turmoil by border incursions all along India's northern frontiers, and by one episode, in 1964, when Chinese armies moved deep into the interior before they withdrew. They have overrun Tibet in one of the most naked aggressions in recent history, have incorporated it (under the rhetoric of a former suzerainty) within their own domain, and in the process have all but destroyed an ancient culture. The shadow of their power looms over Burma and Cambodia, both of which have broken with the West and reoriented themselves toward their powerful neighbor. The Chinese have encouraged, and done much to equip and supply, the Viet Gong rebellion against South Vietnam. There are already signs of a similar movement in Thailand with Chinese encouragement and support. In Indonesia they went so far as to help engineer an unsuccessful plot by the Indonesian Communist party against the Sukarno government, on the theory that while Sukarno was himself friendly, the effective power lay with the army leaders.

The Indonesian instance, itself a massive fiasco that resulted in the massacre of perhaps 200,000 Communists and set back Chinese aims in Indonesia by a decade, is a symbol of how little success the Chinese have thus far had in carrying out their design for power. In Africa they have almost wholly failed, except for a foothold of influence in the Brazzaville Congo Republic and a less firm one in Tanzania. In Latin America the Castroist movements have been allied with Russia rather than with China. In Asia the annexation of Tibet has been the one solid achievement of Chinese expansionism, and the Vietnamese war has had the effect of engaging American troops and strength over an extended period of time, and of temporarily damaging America's relations with its allies and its standing in the UN.

James Reston quotes an Asian prime minister as saying: "You Americans ... taught us everything we know about pragmatism, but you are not approaching China pragmatically. You are operating on what China says and not on what China does." The striking fact about the Chinese has been the combination of truculent pronouncements along with relatively wary actions, especially in staying clear of war in Asia itself. This has been true of their refusal to mount an invasion of Taiwan, and even of their failure to follow up the shelling of the offshore islands. True, the Chinese did carry through on their threatened intervention in the Korean War across the 38th Parallel. But it was a gamble in which the risks of further escalation were not high. The Chinese were much warier in refraining from direct intervention in the war between Pakistan and India in 1965, and thus far in the Vietnam war as well.

They have been careful not to push beyond the limits of their effective power. Their power base itself has thus far not been great. Their huge army forces are not yet adequately equipped, their air force is minor, their navy negligible, and their nuclear power still in its early stages, without delivery systems for the missiles on which they are working. We tend to forget that, with all its population and resources, China has not yet become one of the industrial powers. In terms of its industrial product, it is inferior not only to America and the Soviet Union, but to France, both Germanys, Great Britain and Sweden: One estimate puts it somewhere on a par with tiny Belgium. While it has often given the impression of being a nation in a great hurry by its pronouncements and incitements, it has in fact kept itself from major military showdowns while trying to build a stronger industrial base. The real adventurism and overhastiness have come in the internal economic policy of the regime. The great leap forward in the economic plan, which suffered so disastrous a failure and from which China is only just recovering, can be best explained by the pressure to build this base quickly in order to move ahead with China's global military and political ambitions.

The detonation of China's first atomic weapon, on October 16, 1964, intensified many of the Western and Soviet fears about China's future world role. Secretary McNamara's estimate is that despite its problems of industrialization, China will have delivery capabilities for medium-range missiles by 1967 and for long-range missiles by 1975. It will thus have, before another decade, a chance for the kind of major confrontations—with India, possibly with Japan, with the Soviet Union and with America—that it has thus far avoided. And it will not have to tread as softly as it is doing now in the early stages of its atomic development, while it fears reprisals that could wipe out its incipient nuclear power. But to put it thus is another way of saying that only a few years remain for a final effort to bring China into the world community. For even today, when China has not yet developed the strength of a modern great power, it has shown itself capable of raising a number of challenges to its Asian neighbors and to America and Russia. When China does develop nuclear strength and a firmer economic base, it will have more than its current capacity for mischief and disorder: It will be able to force a very dangerous showdown. It should be the aim of American policy, as far as possible, to avoid such a showdown. There is one school of American military-political thinking that urges a preventive destruction of Chinese atomic power now, before it becomes too great. This is a dangerously adventurist course. The course of prudence will be to prevent the confrontation by an effort to make Chinese policy more responsible and pacific.

What effect would China's membership in the UN have upon its power in world affairs? There are many who feel that a China inside the UN, with a stage on which it could dramatize its position, and with a voice in world councils, might keep the world in continuous turmoil. They also fear the increased prestige it would have in the factional struggles of the overseas Chinese, and the increased opportunities for the Chinese espionage network in the new embassies and consulates that would come as a result of UN admission.

This might well prove true. But it cannot be used as an argument against Chinese membership. It is simply one of the facts about the UN that membership in it carries advantages of prestige and publicity, along with duties and burdens. To refuse membership to any nation on the ground that admittance would strengthen it is to apply to it a measuring stick not used for the others, and extraneous to the purposes of the UN itself. If China would in fact be strengthened by being part of the UN, that is one of the facts of global life that its opponents will have to recognize and accept as such, for the alternative promises chaos and world-wide war.

This brings us to the nub of the matter. The question of the admission of China to the UN should not turn on issues of the world power struggle, but on our basic ideas about the nature of the UN and our concern for its enduring strength. The UN was meant to be a means toward collective security and not an instrument in the world power struggle, nor should it be turned into such an instrument now. The basic principle must be that of recognizing the operative realities and the de facto situation in any nation.

Since October 1949, the Chinese people on the mainland have in fact been ruled by the Communist government of Mao Tse-tung, as the People's Republic of China. During that same period the people on the island of Taiwan, off the mainland, have in fact been ruled by a Chiang Kai-shek government that, although calling itself the Republic of China, has no power on the mainland and no realistic hope for its return to power. These are the only facts relevant for the UN on the question of membership. As long as the UN holds to that ground, it has a secure base for its decisions. Questions of the formal legality or of the justice or injustice of either regime are not operative here. What is crucial is that both regimes have been functioning since 1949. If there were any doubts at the start about their stability, those doubts have now been resolved. It is time for the UN to recognize the principle of de facto power as applying to both nations—China and Taiwan—and to steer clear of any effort by pressure groups on either side to use the UN as an instrument for taking sides in power struggles or for redrawing the map of Asia.

This bears on the most troublesome issue in the problem of admission: that of whether "Nationalist China" should be expelled from the UN at the same time that Communist China is admitted, and whether the new member should immediately succeed to the permanent seat on the Security Council that Nationalist China has held. Communist China and its sponsors, which in the 1965 admissions struggle were Albania and Cambodia, have adamantly insisted that since there can legally be only one China, it must be the People's Republic of China, including not only mainland China but Taiwan and the smaller offshore islands as well. They regard the present Taiwan regime as illegal, and as an interloper in the UN, to be ousted by the same act that admits the People's Republic to its rightful place in the UN and its Security Council. By parallel reasoning, the position of the Chiang Kai-shek regime is that it is still the only legal Chinese government, and that Communist China is a usurper government and an outlaw on the world scene. Both of these are legalist positions. Obviously, Communist China has the better claim, beyond legalism, on the hard empirical ground that it is in possession of the mainland. But by the same empirical reasoning, Taiwan is also a reality—not as China but as Taiwan. The best consistent position that the UN and the U.S. can take is to apply to both regimes the principle of operative de facto power, covering only the territory that each holds.

I am not speaking of a "two-Chinas" solution, which is an absurd phrase for an impossible premise. There cannot be two Chinas occupying the same UN seat, just as there cannot be two Chinas occupying the same continental space. There is one China and one Taiwan. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the past, those are today's facts and the UN must base its action on them, with a package resolution that would admit Communist China and retain Taiwan not as the "Republic of China" but as the "Republic of Taiwan." America should take the lead in advocating this policy. As The New York Times has put it, "Washington would be wise to consider a switch in policy from one of keeping Peking out of the UN to one of keeping Taiwan in." The failure of America to take this lead, the Times adds, "will make it easier for the Assembly to vote Peking in and Taiwan out."

This leaves as the hardest problem of all the question of what Communist China's relation will be to the Security Council seat that has from the start been assigned to the legal Chinese government, and that is now occupied by Taiwan. It is my strong hunch that this issue has weighed more heavily than any other with American policy makers. They are understandably reluctant to consent to the expulsion of Taiwan, which has been a faithful ally and is still a strong American power base in the Pacific. But even if Taiwan can be kept in the UN, the American leaders may have a genuine doubt about how China would use its seat in the Security Council, in debate and especially in voting, and in the use of the veto that goes with each of the five seats provided for "permanent members" in the original Charter. The veto arrangement was the result of an agreement among Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, as a way of assuring the UN's founding states that the Council would not override their national interests by a majority vote. China was included at the time largely because of Roosevelt's insistence, against the judgment of Stalin as well as of Churchill. China was not a real great power, but today it is far along the way to becoming one. Quite possibly a Chinese Communist regime, seated in the UN Council, may decide to use its position as a potent weapon against the "urban" power heartland of America and Europe, even at the risk of paralyzing the UN itself in the process.

But this is again part of the unavoidable gamble to be faced by America, Britain, Russia and the other great powers. It is part of the gamble of responsibility involved in bringing China into the world community; if the UN cannot survive a second Communist state as a permanent member of the Security Council, its future is shaky at best.

Does China genuinely want to join the world community? When André Malraux visited Peking in 1965, and asked the Chinese leaders about their attitude toward the UN, he got a wary response but not a negative one. As I mentioned earlier, the Chinese have used their allies, Albania and Cambodia, to sponsor the resolution for admitting them, and they have kept close watch over the language of the resolution—which means that they do want to come in, but on their own terms. If America persists in its wholly negative position, the Chinese may succeed in getting the UN Assembly to declare that this is not an "important question" within the meaning of Article XVIII of the Charter (as it did in December 1965 on an African-Asian resolution to dismantle military bases in colonial countries), and bring China in by a majority rather than a two-thirds vote. But if America takes the lead in a resolution to bring China in while Taiwan is kept in, it could get a two-thirds vote, keep the procedural rule from being broken, and come out of the whole process with prestige.

Such an American policy for China and the UN would naturally be followed by mutual diplomatic recognition and the exchange of ambassadors between China and America. The "China lobby" has worked hard and effectively against such recognition, as well as against UN membership for China. But it has proved to be far from invincible, as evidenced by the new climate of opinion developing in America on the question of policy toward China. The stronger resistance is likely to come not from America but from China. The real question for some time has not been whether America will recognize Communist China, but whether China will recognize "imperialist" America. The Chinese rulers may well feel that they cannot afford to lose America as an enemy, exactly at a time when the image of the American enemy serves as a cement to unite the Chinese people behind their rulers. We must not underestimate the need for such an enemy on the part of a regime that is very much in a hurry and must demand sacrifices from its people. For that very reason, a dramatic American gesture in reversing its policy by actively sponsoring Chinese membership in the UN and offering diplomatic recognition would undercut the enemy role in which the Chinese rulers have tried to cast America. And if China still refused to meet America half way on diplomatic recognition, the world would know where the burden of the failure belonged.

With mutual recognition would come a breaking down of the wall of noncommunication between the two countries—a wall that now prevents journalists, teachers, scientists, social thinkers, writers and artists of each nation from visiting the other (although, as this article goes to press, American adamancy is weakening on these matters, the core issues are unchanged). This would not ensure or even imply that power struggles and doctrinal wars would cease. But America's experience with the Soviet Union suggests that, even while there have been spy trials, and declamations in the UN, and power confrontations, the quieter forms of diplomatic and cultural interchange have led to a growing understanding. There is no reason this should not happen in time with China.

The UN itself, moreover, not only as a diplomatic site but also as a world political and cultural center, has a dissolvent effect on insular prides and prejudices. It has taught Americans and Russians many things about each other and themselves, just as it has taught Africans and Asians and Latin Americans. It may well help the Chinese break down some of their age-old xenophobic attitudes, and—without diminishing their pride in their historic culture—open them to other cultures that have deep-seated pride of their own.

One of the consequences of the Great Debate, early in 1966, over the American role in the Vietnam war was a public re-examination of American policy toward China. A large number of American experts on Asian affairs were involved in this debate. What emerged was a clearly discernible shift in American opinion, best expressed in the testimony of Professor A. Doak Barnett of Columbia University before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He pointed out that the American efforts to contain Chinese expansionism have had some substantial success, but that American policy directed toward isolating China from the rest of the world has been largely futile. This approach was also expressed in a speech by Vice President Humphrey, who characterized the new American policy as one of "containment, not isolation." It marked the beginning of the end of the American effort, since the Chinese revolution of 1948, to throw a cordon sanitaire around China's growing strength.

The fact is that even America's closest allies—including Great Britain, France, West Germany, Canada, India and Japan—have in one way or another resisted American efforts toward isolating China. The British recognized China as early as 1950, and the French in 1964. The other allies, while thus far refraining from diplomatic recognition, have refused to go along with the trade boycott of China. The new American policy—if, indeed, it should prove to be such—would therefore represent an acceptance of political and economic realities, and an effort to work within them. Beyond the problems of trade and cultural relations with China, such a new policy is bound to have a healthy effect on America's relations with its older allies and with the developing nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America. This is especially true of the younger generation in these countries that will be assuming positions of power, in both the commanding elites and the intellectual elites, in the next decade. One of the sources of the anti-American feeling on the part of this generation has been the refusal of American policy makers to recognize the reality of China as a new fact of life in Asia, and its effort to assume a major world role consistent with its earlier history and traditions as a great power. If America succeeds in playing down this aspect of its China policy, it can more effectively concentrate on the policy of containment—that is to say, the effort to influence and diminish the militancy of China's foreign policy and its disrupting impact on the structure of orderly relations.

What applies to elite groups abroad applies also to similar groups within American society. The resistance movement among both students and faculty on the issue of the Vietnam war, which has so deeply divided American intellectual opinion, goes beyond Vietnam itself and extends to the issue of China's world role as an operative fact today. There is no question here of identifying with China's revolutionary aims, although that is doubtless true of a tiny segment of the American left. It is a question, rather, of refusing to shut our eyes against a major world development, and of building a foreign policy that is confident and imaginative enough to challenge this force on its own terms. For America to adopt such a policy toward China would be to parallel the containment policy it adopted toward Russia at the crucial turning point in European history, in 1947 and 1948. The efforts at containing Russian power did not exclude continuing diplomatic and cultural relations with the Soviet Union, and were accompanied by a major program to help rebuild Europe through Marshall Plan aid. Since this policy proved tolerably successful in confronting Russian power, it should prove equally successful over a period of time in confronting Chinese power.

It would also be helpful in achieving the minimum world consensus that is necessary to control nuclear policies and keep the world from a destructive missile war. Overkill weapons can be controlled, provided the great powers can reach a meeting of minds, first on the proliferation of these weapons, then on disarmament, and finally on a world policing authority. But this world consensus cannot be achieved without recognizing China's role as a world force and a growing nuclear power. It is by no means certain that China will go along with these efforts for world peace. But the attempt must be made. The alternative is more turmoil and anguish—for America, for China and for the rest of the world—than we dare envision.