Mao had governed as a traditional emperor of a majestic and aweinspiring kind. He embodied the myth of the imperial ruler supplying the link between heaven and earth and closer to the divine than the terrestrial. Deng governed in the spirit of another Chinese tradition: basing omnipotence on the ubiquitousness but also the invisibility of the ruler.

  Many cultures, and surely all Western ones, buttress the authority of the ruler by demonstrative contact of some kind with the ruled. This is why in Athens, Rome, and most Western pluralistic states, oratory was considered an asset in government. There is no general tradition of oratory in China (Mao was somewhat of an exception). Chinese leaders traditionally have not based their authority on rhetorical skills or physical contact with the masses. In the mandarin tradition, they operate essentially out of sight, legitimized by performance. Deng held no major office; he refused all honorific titles; he almost never appeared on television, and practiced politics almost entirely behind the scenes. He ruled not like an emperor but as the principal mandarin.14

  Mao had governed by counting on the endurance of the Chinese people to sustain the suffering his personal visions would impose on them. Deng governed by liberating the creativeness of the Chinese people to bring about their own vision of the future. Mao strove for economic advancement with mystical faith in the power of the Chinese “masses” to overcome any obstacle by sheer willpower and ideological purity. Deng was forthright about China’s poverty and the vast gaps that separated its standard of living from that of the developed world. Decreeing that “poverty is not socialism,” Deng proclaimed that China needed to obtain foreign technology, expertise, and capital to remedy its deficiencies.

  Deng culminated his return at the December 1978 Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. The Plenum promulgated the slogan that would characterize all of Deng’s subsequent policies: “Reform and Opening Up.” Marking a break with Maoist orthodoxy, the Central Committee approved pragmatic “socialist modernization” policies echoing Zhou Enlai’s Four Modernizations. Private initiative in agriculture was again permitted. The verdict on the crowds mourning Zhou (which had earlier been deemed “counterrevolutionary”) was reversed, and the veteran military commander Peng Dehuai—who had commanded during the Korean War and was later purged by Mao for criticizing the Great Leap Forward—was posthumously rehabilitated. At the close of the conference, Deng issued a clarion call in a speech on “how to emancipate our minds, use our heads, seek truth from facts and unite as one in looking to the future.” After a decade in which Mao Zedong had prescribed the answer to virtually all of life’s questions, Deng stressed the need to loosen ideological constraints and encourage “thinking things out for yourself.”15

  Using Lin Biao as a metaphor for the Gang of Four and aspects of Mao, Deng condemned “intellectual taboos” and “bureaucratism.” Merit needed to replace ideological correctness; too many took the road of least resistance and fell in with the prevalent stagnation:

  In fact, the current debate about whether practice is the sole criterion for testing truth is also a debate about whether people’s minds need to be emancipated. . . . When everything has to be done by the book, when thinking turns rigid and blind faith is the fashion, it is impossible for a party or a nation to make progress. Its life will cease and that party or nation will perish.16

  Independent creative thinking was to be the principal guideline of the future:

  The more Party members and other people there are who use their heads and think things through, the more our cause will benefit. To make revolution and build socialism we need large numbers of pathbreakers who dare to think, explore new ways and generate new ideas. Otherwise, we won’t be able to rid our country of poverty and backwardness or to catch up with—still less surpass—the advanced countries.17

  The break with Maoist orthodoxy, at the same time, revealed the reformer’s dilemma. The revolutionary’s dilemma is that most revolutions occur in opposition to what is perceived as abuse of power. But the more existing obligations are dismantled, the more force must be used to re-create a sense of obligation. Hence the frequent outcome of revolution is an increase in central power; the more sweeping the revolution, the more this is true.

  The dilemma of reform is the opposite. The more the scope of choice is expanded, the harder it becomes to compartmentalize it. In pursuit of productivity, Deng stressed the importance of “thinking things out for yourself” and advocated the “complete” emancipation of minds. Yet what if those minds, once emancipated, demanded political pluralism? Deng’s vision called for “large numbers of pathbreakers who dare to think, explore new ways and generate new ideas,” but it assumed that these pathbreakers would limit themselves to exploring practical ways to build a prosperous China and stay away from exploration of ultimate political objectives. How did Deng envision reconciling emancipation of thought with the imperative for political stability? Was this a calculated risk, based on the assessment that China had no better alternative? Or did he, following Chinese tradition, reject the likelihood of any challenge to political stability, especially as Deng was making the Chinese people better off and considerably freer? Deng’s vision of economic liberalization and national revitalization did not include a significant move toward what would be recognized in the West as pluralistic democracy. Deng sought to preserve one-party rule not so much because he reveled in the perquisites of power (he famously abjured many of the luxuries of Mao and Jiang Qing), but because he believed the alternative was anarchy.

  Deng was soon forced to confront these issues. In the 1970s, he had encouraged individuals to air their grievances about suffering during the Cultural Revolution. But when this newfound openness developed into nascent pluralism, Deng in 1979 found himself obliged to discuss in detail how he understood the nature of freedom as well as its limits:

  In the recent period a small number of persons have provoked incidents in some places. Instead of accepting the guidance, advice, and explanations of leading officials of the Party and government, certain bad elements have raised sundry demands that cannot be met at present or are altogether unreasonable. They have provoked or tricked some of the masses into raiding Party and government organizations, occupying offices, holding sit-down and hunger strikes and obstructing traffic, thereby seriously disrupting production, other work and public order.18

  That these incidents were not isolated or rare events was demonstrated by the catalogue of them presented by Deng. He described the China Human Rights Group, which had gone so far as to request that the President of the United States show concern for human rights in China: “Can we permit such an open call for intervention in China’s internal affairs?”19 Deng’s catalogue included the Shanghai Democracy Forum, which, according to Deng, advocated a turn to capitalism. Some of these groups, according to Deng, had made clandestine contact with the Nationalist authorities in Taiwan, and others were talking of seeking political asylum abroad.

  This was an astonishing admission of political challenge. Deng was clearer about its scope than about how to deal with it:

  [T]he struggle against these individuals is no simple matter that can be settled quickly. We must strive to clearly distinguish between people (many of them innocent young people) and the counter-revolutionaries and bad elements who have hoodwinked them, and whom we must deal with sternly and according to law. . . .

  What kind of democracy do the Chinese people need today? It can only be socialist democracy, people’s democracy, and not bourgeois democracy, individualist democracy.20

  Though he was insistent on authoritarian conduct of politics, Deng abandoned the personality cult, declined to purge his predecessor Hua Guofeng (instead allowing him to fade into insignificance), and began planning for an orderly succession for himself. After consolidating power, Deng declined to occupy most of the top formal positions in the Party hierarchy.21 As he explained to me in 1982, when I met with him in Beijing:

  DENG: . . . I am approaching the stage when I will become outmoded.

  KISSINGER: It doesn’t appear so from reading the documents of the Party Congress.

  DENG: I am now on the Advisory Commission.

  KISSINGER: I consider that a sign of self-confidence. . . .

  DENG: The aging of our leadership has compelled us to this so we have historical experience and lessons. . . .

  KISSINGER: I do not know what title to use for you.

  DENG: I have several hats. I am a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo and Chairman of the Advisory Commission and also Chairman of the People’s Political Consultative Conference. I would like to give this out to others. I have too many titles. . . . I have so many titles. I want to do as less as possible. My colleagues also hope I will take care of less routine affairs. The only purpose is that I can live longer.

  Deng broke with the precedent set by Mao by downplaying his own expertise rather than presenting himself as a genius in any particular field. He entrusted his subordinates to innovate, then endorsed what worked. As he explained, with typical directness, in a 1984 conference on foreign investment: “I am a layman in the field of economics. I have made a few remarks on the subject but all from a political point of view. For example, I proposed China’s economic policy of opening to the outside world, but as for the details or specifics of how to implement it, I know very little indeed.”22

  As he elaborated his domestic vision, Deng grew into China’s face to the world. By 1980, his ascendance was complete. At the Fifth Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in February 1980, Hua Guofeng’s supporters were demoted or relieved of their posts; Deng’s allies, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, were appointed to the Politburo Standing Committee. Deng’s massive changes were not achieved without significant social and political tensions, ultimately culminating in the Tiananmen Square crisis of 1989. But a century after the thwarted promise of China’s self-strengthening nineteenth-century reformers, Deng had tamed and reinvented Mao’s legacy, launching China headlong on a course of reform that was, in time, to reclaim the influence to which its performance and history entitled it.

  CHAPTER 13

  “Touching the Tiger’s Buttocks” The Third Vietnam War

  IN APRIL 1979, Hua Guofeng, still China’s Premier, summed up the results of the Third Vietnam War, in which China had invaded Vietnam and withdrawn after six weeks, in a contemptuous dig at the Soviet role: “They did not dare to move. So after all we could still touch the buttocks of the tiger.”1

  China had invaded Vietnam to “teach it a lesson” after Vietnamese troops had occupied Cambodia in response to a series of border clashes with the Khmer Rouge, which had taken over Cambodia in 1975, and in ultimate pursuit of Hanoi’s goal of creating an Indochinese Federation. China had done so in defiance of a mutual defense treaty between Hanoi and Moscow, signed less than a month earlier. The war had been extremely costly to the Chinese armed forces, not yet fully restored from the depredations of the Cultural Revolution.2 But the invasion served its fundamental objective: when the Soviet Union failed to respond it demonstrated the limitations of its strategic reach. From that point of view, it can be considered a turning point of the Cold War, though it was not fully understood as such at the time. The Third Vietnam War was also the high point of Sino-American strategic cooperation during the Cold War.

  Vietnam: Confounder of Great Powers

  China found itself involved in the Third Vietnam War by factors comparable to what had drawn the United States into the second one. Something in the almost maniacal Vietnamese nationalism drives other societies to lose their sense of proportion and to misapprehend Vietnamese motivations and their own possibilities. That certainly was America’s fate in what is now treated by historians as the Second Vietnam War (the first being Vietnam’s anticolonial war with France). Americans found it difficult to accept that a medium-sized developing nation could cultivate such a fierce commitment only for its own parochial causes. Hence they interpreted Vietnamese actions as symbols of a deeper design. Hanoi’s combativeness was treated as a vanguard of a Sino-Soviet coordinated conspiracy to dominate at least Asia. And Washington believed as well that once the initial thrust by Hanoi was blocked, some diplomatic compromise might emerge.

  The assessment was wrong on both grounds. Hanoi was not any other country’s proxy. It fought for its vision of independence and, ultimately, for an Indochinese Federation, which assigned to Hanoi in Southeast Asia the dominant role Beijing had historically played in East Asia. To these single-minded survivors of centuries of conflict with China, compromise was inconceivable between their idea of independence and any outsider’s conception of stability. The poignancy of the Second Vietnam War in Indochina was the interaction between the American yearning for compromise and the North Vietnamese insistence on victory.

  In that sense, America’s overriding mistake in the Vietnam War was not what divided the American public: whether the U.S. government was sufficiently devoted to a diplomatic outcome. Rather, it was the inability to face the fact that a so-called diplomatic outcome, so earnestly—even desperately—sought by successive administrations of both American political parties, required pressures equivalent to what amounted to the total defeat of Hanoi—and that Moscow and Beijing had only a facilitating, not a directive, role.

  In a more limited way, Beijing fell into a parallel misconception. When the U.S. buildup in Vietnam began, Beijing interpreted it in wei qi terms: as another example of American bases surrounding China from Korea to the Taiwan Strait and now to Indochina. China supported the North Vietnamese guerrilla war, partly for reasons of ideology, partly in order to push American bases as far from Chinese borders as possible. Zhou Enlai told North Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong in April 1968 that China supported North Vietnam to prevent the strategic encirclement of China, to which Pham Van Dong gave an equivocal reply—largely because preventing the encirclement of China was not a Vietnamese objective and Vietnamese objectives were national ones:

  ZHOU: For a long time, the United States has been halfencircling China. Now the Soviet Union is also encircling China. The circle is getting complete, except [the part of] Vietnam.

  PHAM: We are all the more determined to defeat the US imperialists in all of Vietnamese territory.

  ZHOU: That is why we support you.

  PHAM: That we are victorious will have a positive impact in Asia. Our victory will bring about unforeseeable outcomes.

  ZHOU: You should think that way.3

  In pursuit of a Chinese strategy from which Pham Van Dong had been careful to stay aloof, China sent over 100,000 noncombat military personnel to support North Vietnamese infrastructure and logistics. The United States opposed North Vietnam as the spearhead of a Soviet-Chinese design. China supported Hanoi to blunt a perceived American thrust to dominate Asia. Both were mistaken. Hanoi fought only for its own national account. And a unified Communist-led Vietnam, victorious in its second war in 1975, would turn out to be a far greater strategic threat to China than to the United States.

  The Vietnamese eyed their northern neighbor with suspicion approaching paranoia. During long periods of Chinese domination, Vietnam had absorbed the Chinese writing system and political and cultural forms (evidenced, most spectacularly, in the imperial palace and tombs at the former capital of Hue). Vietnam had used these “Chinese” institutions, however, to build a separate state and bolster its own independence. Geography did not allow Vietnam to retreat into isolation as Japan had at a comparable period in its history. From the second century B.C. through the tenth century, Vietnam was under more or less direct Chinese rule, reemerging fully as an independent state only with the collapse of the Tang Dynasty in the year 907.

  Vietnamese national identity came to reflect the legacy of two somewhat contradictory forces: on the one hand, absorption of Chinese culture; on the other, opposition to Chinese political and military domination. Resistance to China helped produce a passionate pride in Vietnamese independence and a formidable military tradition. Absorption of Chinese culture provided Vietnam with a Chinese-style Confucian elite who possessed something of a regional Middle Kingdom complex of their own vis-à-vis their neighbors. During the Indochina wars of the twentieth century, Hanoi displayed its sense of political and cultural entitlement by availing itself of Lao and Cambodian neutral territory as if by right and, after the war, extending “special relationships” with the Communist movements in each of these countries, amounting to Vietnamese dominance.

  Vietnam confronted China with an unprecedented psychological and geopolitical challenge. Hanoi’s leaders were familiar with Sun Tzu’s Art of War and employed its principles to significant effect against both France and the United States. Even before the end of the long Vietnam wars, first with the French seeking to reclaim their colony after World War II, and then with the United States from 1963 to 1975, both Beijing and Hanoi began to realize that the next contest would be between themselves for dominance in Indochina and Southeast Asia.

  Cultural proximity may account for the relative absence of the sure touch in strategic analysis that usually guided Chinese policy during America’s Vietnam War. Ironically, Beijing’s long-term strategic interest was probably parallel to Washington’s: an outcome in which four Indochinese states (North and South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) balanced each other. This may explain why Mao, in outlining possible outcomes of the war to Edgar Snow in 1965, listed an outcome preserving South Vietnam as possible and, therefore, presumably acceptable.4