Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

While the structure of the governmental system of Red China is very similar to that of Soviet Russia, its spirit seems quite different. This is reflected in two ways. In Russia the Old Bolsheviks of the early days of the party were all eliminated, mostly by violent death, in the internecine power struggles which went on behind the grim walls of the Kremlin, while the Politburo throughout maintained a monolithic, impassive face to the outside world. In Red China most of the party leaders of today are still those who came together to engage in the earliest revolutionary struggles of the party in the 1920’s. Moreover, they have, over the past forty years, often differed and even engaged in violent struggles and controversies with each other, but always were able to continue to work together, and to patch up their differences. The real distinction here is that the Kremlin has always insisted on presenting to the outside world a picture of itself as united and infallible. This is why Khrushchev’s speech at the Twentieth Party Congress, attacking Stalin, was such a shock to the world. But the Chinese party leadership has never hesitated to admit that it has often been divided and fallible. Even Mao has changed his ideas and admitted his errors. Moreover, this, apparently, can be done without any need to punish or to liquidate the fallible comrades.

The key to this rather significant difference in the tone of Communist government in Moscow and Peking may be found in two basic distinctions: a difference of outlook and a difference of procedure. In Russia the ancient doctrinaire and rigidly ideologistic tone associated with the traditional Russian outlook and the traditional Russian religious system, both going back to their roots in Greek rationalism and Zoroastrian religion, established patterns of ideology that have continued under materialistic and atheistic Communism. Such attitudes are foreign to the traditions of Chinese pragmatism. Moreover, the origins of Chinese Communist organization in discussion groups in which all those present recognized their own ignorance and the inadequacy of their information on social facts, as well as on Marxist dogma, has continued in the practice of almost endless party meetings on all levels, filled with discussion, debate, and individual examination of one’s own position and attitudes. As one remarkable consequence of these differences between China and the Soviet Union, there are at least half a dozen legal, minor political parties in Red China today. These not only exist and are permitted to participate in the governing process in a very minor way, but they are subject to no real efforts at forcible suppression, although they are subject to persistent, rather gentle, efforts at conversion. Such efforts would, of course, change to ruthless reprisal, if these tamed minor parties made any real effort to change or destroy the position of the Communist Party itself. These differences between Communism in China and the Soviet Union may be explained most readily in terms of the different traditions of the two countries. The same applies to their different foreign policies, to which we have already referred.

The foreign policy of Red China has a number of diverse aims that hold quite distinct status on any list of Chinese priorities. Naturally, in first place is to avoid any foreign-policy action that might jeopardize the Communist regime in China. In second place is the desire to restore the traditional international position of old imperial China as a self-sufficient, isolated giant surrounded by subordinate tributary states; in this case the tribute consists of ideological loyalty to the Chinese Communist position. In third place is the Chinese desire to restore a unified ideological bloc on a world-wide basis supporting the true (Chinese) version of Marxist-Leninism. This version is not completely orthodox in traditional Marxist-Leninist terms, since it expects Communist regimes to rise in backward and ex-colonial countries rather than in advanced industrial countries, and expects these events to be precipitated and carried through by discontented peasants under intellectual leaders rather than by the industrial proletariat. On the other hand, this version is certainly closer to the facts of present-day politics, and on many points, such as the inevitability of revolution, the necessary imperialist aggression of advanced capitalist states, and the role of war as the midwife of Communism, is closer to Leninism than the ideas actually held in the Kremlin. The argument as to which version of Communist ideology, the Chinese or the Russian, is closer to Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy is singularly unrewarding, since both sides claim the advantage here, and the ideology itself, however interpreted, is so remote from the facts of economic-social development in advanced countries that no real virtue can exist in being orthodox. The chief fact is that the Chinese version is potentially a much greater source of trouble to the outside world than Khrushchev’s ideas of peaceful competition and noninevitable war. The Chinese version is dangerous simply because it threatens the West in an area where it is particularly vulnerable and where it has shown no great competence, that is, among the underdeveloped nations.

However, Chinese aggression in the period since 1954 has not been based on this third priority in its foreign-policy schedule but on its second priority, which seeks to create a belt of satellite subordinate states around the Chinese borders. The year 1954 may be taken as the initial date in this effort, because at that time the Peking government published a map of China that showed the Chinese border pushed deeply into Tibet, India, and southeast Asia. As early as the end of 1949, the Red Chinese had commenced a moderate intervention in Vietnam, but their most successful effort to restore the traditional Chinese satellite system was in Tibet.

China’s suzerainty in Tibet has been generally recognized by the outside world, even in the years when China was rent by civil wars and banditry. By the treaty of May 23, 1957, Tibet itself accepted this status without recognizing that the status of “suzerainty” could become one of direct subordination, under Chinese pressure. This pressure began at once, and reached an acute stage in March 1959, when the Chinese authorities sought to arrest the Dalai Lama, head of the theocratic Tibetan government. The anti-Chinese revolt that resulted was crushed in two weeks, and the Dalai Lama fled to India.

During this period Chinese pressure continued into southeastern Asia, in Burma, which desperately tried to maintain a neutralist course, and especially in the successor states of former Indochina. The subsequent division of Vietnam, the struggle for Laos, and the valiant efforts of Cambodia to follow Burma’s path to neutralism have already been mentioned. For years, guerrilla operations in South Vietnam and Laos have permitted an increased Chinese intervention in the area and have made increasing demands on American wealth and power to oppose it.

No solution to the problem of southeast Asia can be based on the belief that its troubles arise wholly, or even largely, from Communism or from Chinese aggression. For centuries, the central portion of the Malaysian peninsula, consisting of Laos and Cambodia along the Mekong River, has been under pressure from the Thai peoples to the west and the Vietnamese to the east. From at least the seventeenth century, the area we regard as Laos was divided into three or more petty kingdoms that were unable to unite in resistance to their more imperialist neighbors. The French hegemony in all of Indochina, from the nineteenth century to the Japanese invasion in 1942, suspended this process, but it would have been resumed in any case with the collapse of the French colonial systern there in 1954. So too, the southward movement of the Chinese, attracted by the rich rice lands of the Malayan river deltas, would have occurred in any case, even if Communism had never been invented. The Communist issue simply added another, very acute, issue to a complex situation.