Bad Blood
The Legacy of History for US-China Relations
To most visitors to China, the history of the civilization is presented as a
series of proud symbols from the majestic Great Wall to the extraordinary
Terracotta Warriors. Modern history generally does not rate a mention,
except for the occasional allusion to China’s space program or some such recent
achievement, which may demonstrate the teleological conclusion of China’s
“long march” back. Indeed, the preceding two hundred years of China’s history
are, at best, the topic for an awkward discussion or, at worst, a humiliating
and indignant theme to broach with the Chinese today. In a startling contrast,
Americans revel in the details of the two hundred years that helped to build
the “Arsenal of Democracy” and resulted in the unmatched superpower of the
post–Cold War period, but they tend to be much less interested in the cultures,
and indeed the often inglorious struggles, that preceded 1776.
If modern history quite rarely presents itself directly in contemporary
China, it may still come into view at bizarre moments. Strolling in the small,
albeit charming, seaside city of Yantai in Northern Shandong, for example,
one may come upon a building labeled the “Former Residence of the American
Consulate General in Yantai.” As in most Chinese cities, such foreign
settlements were generally located on a hill or near a body of water so as to
be maximally defensible, lest the “natives become restless.” Today, the US
government maintains five consulates in China’s largest cities; but how could
it be that more than a hundred years ago, a consulate was maintained in this
rather obscure corner of China? A somewhat similar vignette is suggested by
Bad Blood 27
any traveler to the megalopolis of Wuhan, along the Yangtze River in the very
center of China. Here, the visitor to this industrial hub will find a “bund,”
a row of grand and imposing Western-style buildings, which is only slightly
less impressive than its famous cousin in Shanghai—the most obvious symbol
of the extraordinary role of foreign powers in Chinese modern history.
How is it possible that this city in the middle of China more than a century
ago also had such a major foreign settlement, not coincidentally located
along the river, for protection if necessary by the gunboats? The answer to
these curiosities is that foreign penetration of China at that time was deeper
than is commonly appreciated and, moreover, that the American role, by
turns onlooker and occasionally even “defender” of China’s sovereignty, merits
closer scrutiny.
In a corner of the newly refurbished National Museum in Beijing is an
exhibit portraying the much less subtle viewpoint of the Chinese regime;
one of the first images in this large exhibit detailing the so-called Century
of Humiliation is of a US Marine sitting on the throne chair of the Chinese
emperor in the Forbidden City after the suppression of the Boxer “Rebellion”
in 1900. The complex story of just how a young Marine came to strike such
a pose is discussed below. But here we may surmise that this picture and its
prominent placement in China’s new display in the National Museum may
pose significant challenges for US-China relations.
The journalist Rob Gifford writes: “History hangs over China. Like a vapor
that used to be sweet but has somehow imperceptibly turned bad, it seeps into
every corner and silently makes its way into the mind of every Chinese person.
. . . In 1793, China was the export superpower; its silk, tea, and porcelain
were in demand around the world. . . . [But] . . . along came the hairy barbarians
from the ocean, and everything that Chinese people previously thought
was magnificent and a sign of their superior culture suddenly became a symbol
of backwardness, . . . as the ocean people semicolonized China.”1
Practical people are often not especially concerned with history, and it is
natural to ask at this point why a pragmatic guide to substantive progress
in US-China relations would take up the nagging questions of history at all
when these pages could reasonably be devoted to the dissection of competing
policy proposals and various contending interests. The reason, simply stated,
is that the relationship is afflicted by history and that this historical baggage,
underlying as it does two very distinct visions of the present and future, now
forms a major barrier to genuine reconciliation and thus also practical progress.
The Chinese are continually confronted with the difficulties and ironies
28 Meeting China Halfway
of Beijing’s conventional historical narrative—one need only consider the
respective economic successes of entities such as Taiwan and Hong Kong to
recognize flaws in the logic of the Chinese Communist Party’s teleological
narrative. But Americans rarely reflect on the roots of US diplomacy in the
Asia-Pacific region, particularly those roots preceding the brilliant victories of
World War II. As in the other chapters of this book, the text here endeavors
to present certain new points of view—where possible, from Chinese authors.
After all, the practice of history in contemporary China has come a long way
from the era of tedious and exasperating discourses on Marx and class warfare.
Recall that the discussion of Chinese sources here does not imply an endorsement
of these assessments, but they are discussed in order to fully explain
Chinese perspectives, which may be safely assumed to be often quite different
from Western perspectives. This chapter is generally aimed at stirring such a
reflection, coming to terms with the very significant bad blood in US-China
relations. As the eminent historian of China John Fairbank has written, “A
new perspective requires . . . that we recognize certain basic features of our
past relations with East Asia.”2
Origins
Although the diplomatic record suggests that official US-China interaction
began in 1844 with the Treaty of Wangxia, it is quite clear that intense commercial
interaction between the United States and China predated that treaty
by almost a half century. American ships in Canton’s harbor apparently vastly
outnumbered British ones during the period 1805–14, obviously taking
advantage of London’s preoccupation with Napoleon in that turbulent period
of European history.3 A Peking University Press 2011 textbook on US-East
Asian relations notes that US interactions with China were led by private
interests and were somewhat different in character than those of the European
imperialist powers, partly because the United States lacked “ at that time . . .
sufficient force.”4 The same source notes that by the 1820s, American traders
were annually bringing into China two thousand boxes of opium.5 A recent
historical appraisal of this period by an American scholar confirms the major
role of American merchants in this nefarious trade. John Haddad concludes
that “British and American traders, by flooding China with opium, taught the
Chinese to distrust all things Western.”6
The Opium War remains the preeminent symbolic turning point in
modern Chinese history and continues to be actively discussed by Chinese
Bad Blood 29
historians.7 For example, one 2012 Chinese scholarly study raises the delicate
issue of how China was defeated when it wielded roughly 887 warships, compared
with just 50 warships deployed by the British.8 Another similar analysis
blames poor integration among the relevant forces, backward armaments, and
a general paucity of resources as some of the factors determining that China
could not “withstand the Western assault.”9
It is certainly not a coincidence that Washington’s first treaty with China,
in 1844, came just two years after the Treaty of Nanjing that ended the Opium
War in 1842. Fairbank cogently explains that a wide gulf separated American
rhetoric, which often condemned European and especially British imperialism,
from practice, whereby US citizens enjoyed the many fruits of semicolonial
status. He writes:
The British sponsored unequal treaty system in East Asia made foreigners
a privileged class on a par with the local ruling class, and certainly
had some attributes of empire. The system was maintained by the presence
of foreign naval firepower and gunboat diplomacy. . . . Americans
got the fruits of informal empire without the hard work. . . . Even the
most undistinguished American citizens—deadbeats, . . . stowaways,
and adventurers—once they disembarked at Shanghai, had upper-class
status thrust upon them. Like the Chinese gentry, they were set above
the masses, not subject to local police coercion. Embarrassed at first to
be pulled by a human horse in a rickshaw, the average American soon
accepted his superiority and found Oriental life and its inexpensive personal
services enjoyable. Even the most egalitarian missionary had to
compromise.10
Current scholarship has reexamined some aspects of Fairbank’s assessment,
suggesting that it minimizes Anglo-American rivalry, especially with respect
to access to East Asian markets, as the chief motivating impulse for American
diplomacy toward China. True, America’s first envoy, Caleb Cushing,
described the Opium War as an incident of “base cupidity and violence, and
[a] high-handed infraction of all law, human and divine, which have characterized
the British . . . in the seas of China.”11 But the fact of Anglo-American
rivalry does not so much undermine as qualify and modify Fairbank’s thesis
that US interests benefited from and acquiesced to British actions in China.
According to an authoritative account of US Navy operations in Chinese
waters by retired US Navy admiral Kemp Tolley, by the 1850s “American
30 Meeting China Halfway
warships in numbers greater than ever before visited [Canton], the jumping
off place for Perry’s operations directed toward opening first the Ryukyus and
then Japan.” Tolley describes numerous incidents of high-handed action by
US forces in China, for example, the actions of the crew of the USS Plymouth,
working with British Royal Navy Marines in March 1853 to confer
“joint educational measures . . . [upon a group of] Chinese soldiery [who had]
moved in on the Shanghai race course, having first inflicted indignities on several
foreign ladies and gentlemen.” In the Battle of Muddy Flats, the Chinese
soldiers, after being shelled and flanked, “fled in great disorder, leaving behind
them a number of wounded and dead.”12
Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom, a new book on the Taiping Rebellion
by Stephen Platt, sheds considerable new light on chaotic and confusing
mid-nineteenth-century China and the not insignificant role that foreigners,
including Americans, had in it. One puzzle described in the book is that the
British government was almost simultaneously attacking the Chinese government
in the so-called Arrow War (or Second Opium War), while shortly
thereafter coming to the aid of the beleaguered Qing Dynasty in suppressing
the Taiping rebels. Platt describes the British actions in the Arrow War as
launched on the “slimmest of pretexts” and led by Lord Elgin, who himself
“found the conduct of his countrymen in Asia morally repulsive.”13
An extraordinary episode symbolic of the evolving US role in China is
related in the course of the Battle of the Taku Forts (near present-day Tianjin),
on June 25, 1859, during the Arrow War. The British commanders, who
were battle-hardened veterans of the Crimean War, did not expect a serious
contest, but they were surprised by stiff and determined Chinese resistance,
which resulted in the “disaster of the Peiho,” where 400 British were killed
or wounded, of whom 29 were officers. Observing this ignominious defeat
was the USS Powhatan, whose commander, Josiah Tattnall, decided at that
moment to cast neutrality aside with the famous statement that “blood is
thicker than water!” Moreover, he was quoted by a reporter at the scene to
have said that “he’d be damned if he’d stand by and see white men butchered
before his eyes.” However, Platt concludes that Tattnall’s intervention only
succeeded in towing “more British Marine reserves forward to their deaths in
the disastrous landing; . . . [but] it gave Americans a taste of blood in China
and set a new tone for British–American friendship.”14
Much more important to the course of the Taiping Rebellion, however, was
the role of another American, Frederick Ward, a mercenary who arrived in
China only after departing Nicaragua, where he and his colleagues had worked
Bad Blood 31
to foment a civil war and create a “Yankee state.” According to Platt, Ward’s
army was recruited among “a mélange of Europeans, Americans, and Filipinos
to fight in the region just outside Shanghai. . . . His army was strictly illegal, a
bald violation of the neutrality ordinance.”15 After a mixed military record—
but one that had a definite impact on the course of this Chinese civil war,
which happened to coincide temporally with the American Civil War—Ward
was killed near Ningbo in September 1862. Platt writes that “Ward’s dying
words, fittingly enough, were a demand for money.”16 In the larger scheme of
modern Chinese history, this new research reveals conclusively that the Qing
Dynasty might well have collapsed in the mid–nineteenth century without
foreign support, which raises a further compelling question of whether so
much bloodshed in twentieth-century century China could have been avoided
if the Taiping Rebellion had actually succeeded. One can only speculate on
this intriguing historical counterfactual, but there seems little question that
foreign intervention did play a significant role in determining the final outcome
and that the American role in this story was of some importance.
American Exceptionalism in Practice
To be sure, profits and geopolitical rivalry formed major motives for the Western
onslaught against China during the nineteenth century, but the missionary
impulse played a definite role as well. Indeed, in Autumn in the Heavenly
Kingdom Platt recounts that Chinese converts to Christianity were included
in the leadership of the Taiping movement and, as is well known, the rebellion
was led by Hong Xiuquan, who claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus
Christ.
As the Peking University textbook on US history in Asia indicates, China
became the preeminent “target for conquest” among American missionaries in
the nineteenth century.17 The same history relates: “The schools founded by
American missionaries in East Asia spread the concepts of modern, Western
civilization, thus forming an important and special, independent progressive
role. . . . The US missionaries and the process of societal transformation and
modernization in East Asia can hardly be separated.”18 Specifically, the history
points out that many modern Chinese hospitals were actually founded
by American missionaries.19 At the same time, it is not clear that this rather
enlightened conclusion is widely held. Contemporary Chinese military elites
may have a very different perspective, as suggested by a 2009 scholarly paper
published in the journal 军事历史研究 (Military Historical Research), where
32 Meeting China Halfway
the foreign churches established in China during the nineteenth century are
described as “strong points for the Western invasion.” The missionaries are
accused of “going out in every direction, secretly gathering [military] intelligence,
bullying and humiliating virtuous people, quibbling over trivia, threatening
blackmail, seizing means of production, lending at high rates of interest,
exploiting peasants, and . . . generally causing significant harm.”20
Although many Americans were no doubt engaged in good works in China,
a recent history of the US role in the Asia-Pacific region appropriately recognizes
that Chinese immigrants simultaneously confronted major racist barriers
and also significant violence in their quest to make a new life in America.
James Bradley quotes a Wyoming state official who arrived first on the scene
of the Rock Springs Massacre in September 1885: “Not a living Chinaman—
man, woman, or child—was left in the town. . . . The smell of burning human
flesh was sickening . . . and plainly discernible for more than a mile along the
railroad.” Bradley adds that during the court trials that followed, there were
no convictions.21 Indeed, the Peking University history textbook on the US
role in East Asia notes that the number of Chinese killed in outbreaks of antiChinese
violence in the United States during this period “was not small.”22
On the cusp of a new century, the United States began to exert newfound
muscle in the region in earnest, beginning with the conquest of the Philippines
in 1898. It is widely recognized that this less-than-glorious episode of
imperialism, which featured not only massacres of Philippine civilians on a
large scale but also saw the invention of “waterboarding” by US soldiers, was
tied to US ambitions for increasing access to markets in China. Thus it is
perhaps not surprising that the US naval squadron that defeated the Spanish
fleet at Manila had come directly and expeditiously from Hong Kong rather
than from US home waters. Shortly thereafter, Washington dispatched a substantial
force of Marines to join the eight-nation expeditionary force sent to
Beijing to repress the xenophobic uprising of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.
Although the Boxers were clearly guilty of grave atrocities against both Westerners
and Chinese Christians, in contemporary China the Boxers tend to be
viewed as patriotic fighters struggling against imperialism. For example, in
the art on display at the Tianjin City Museum, near where the largest battles
of the Boxer Rebellion were fought, an enormous canvas portrays the Boxers
as heroic warriors rising up to defend China against the Western invaders.23
Also, that picture of the US Marine sitting atop the Chinese Emperor’s throne
in the Forbidden City, described at the beginning of this chapter and now
Bad Blood 33
prominently on display in the Chinese National Museum in Beijing, dates
from this period.
Bradley’s account of pre–World War I American diplomacy in East Asia
also reveals a darker side of the Open Door policy that characterized US policy
at the time. A US diplomatic mission including both Secretary of State
William Taft and President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice Roosevelt,
was greeted in a Canton [Guangzhou] that “was plastered with anti-American
posters. . . . Taft ordered Alice to remain in the fortress safety of America’s
island consulate.”24 This immediate outbreak of anti-American feeling was
prompted by perceived unfair trade and immigration laws. A boycott of
American exports undertaken by the Chinese that year may have cut those
exports by as much as half. According to Bradley, “Unable to imagine that
the Chinese would behave as patriots and assuming that they’d always react as
merchants, Roosevelt had fundamentally underestimated the Chinese character
and had lit another long fuse.”25
Admiral Tolley explains the deep antiforeign and indeed anti-American
sentiments pervasive in China at the beginning of the twentieth century:
“Most newcomers to China . . . found it difficult to believe that fundamentally,
the Chinese did not like Americans. But why should they? . . . [It] is
possible to outrage the spirit and antagonize the nature of a people. . . . That,
the Americans had managed to accomplish with signal success. . . . Businessmen
pressed trade at the point of a gun. . . . Missionaries in their thousands,
zealous and well-intentioned, nonetheless manifestly felt and acted superior
to the ‘heathen Chinee,’ who felt that what they considered culturally inferior
people were attempting to foist on them inappropriate morals and dogma.”26
A certain bright farmer’s son studying at a middle school in the Hunan
provincial capital, Changsha, felt the influence of these tensions. As Jonathan
Spence relates, Mao Zedong, at the age of eighteen years in 1912, just one
year after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, wrote an essay discussing leadership
in the ancient Qin Dynasty. His conclusion was that the story illustrated
“the stupidity of the people in our country [of China],” which had delivered
China “to the brink of destruction.” Mao wrote that “if those in the Western
nations . . . heard of [this story], they would laugh uncontrollably . . . and
make derisive noise with their tongues.” Spence observes: “That the derision
of foreigners should be seen as a potent factor to Mao is interesting; . . . by the
first decade of the twentieth century the Chinese were circulating translations
of various sharp critiques of their own country made by foreign missionary
34 Meeting China Halfway
observers, as if to rub salt into their wounds, and Mao had probably seen these
in the newspapers he read so avidly.”27
Another new history of pre–World War II US policy in China by William
Braisted is also revealing and explains how “the operations of US naval
forces in China, though motivated by the best intentions toward China, were
viewed by the people of China in the same way they viewed the actions of
other foreign nations, that is, as violations of Chinese sovereignty. . . . Those
actions contributed to Chinese resentment, . . . which continues to the present.”28
Braisted shows that the US Navy in the interwar period frequently
cooperated closely with both the British and also the Japanese—rather an
embarrassment, considering the tendency of both London and Tokyo, but
increasingly the latter, toward rapacious and destructive behavior in China.
Of the former, Braisted says that “the American and British navies [in China
sometimes] responded as if they were one service.”29 Reflecting on this close
naval cooperation in China during the 1920s, US Navy admiral William
Phelps is said to have quoted a Chinese general complaining to a British official
as follows: “You have seen barges on the Thames deeply laden. But you do
not see any Chinese steamers madly rushing up and down the Thames sinking
British barges and drowning their crews. Well, we’re going to stop foreign
ships rushing heedlessly up our river sinking our junks and drowning their
crews.” Braisted then comments: “Admiral Phelps might have reflected that
there were no Chinese ships or protecting gunboats on American rivers and
coastal waters.”30 In the afterglow of the World War II victory, it is easy to forget
that the chief of the US Navy Asiatic Fleet, Admiral Montgomery Taylor,
in the early 1930s “was regarded at least in the Japanese navy as a friend who
deserved appreciation,” in part because of his inclination to cooperate closely
with Japan in Chinese waters.31
World War II, for all its catastrophic bloodletting, was a kind of silver
lining for US-China relations. There is little doubt that the American heroes
of Midway, Guadalcanal, and thousands of other battles scattered across the
Asia-Pacific region were significantly responsible for China’s liberation following
the defeat of the Japanese Empire. The history of the American Volunteer
Group, or the Flying Tigers, is a particularly compelling story for US-China
relations because it involved not only intense cooperation but also, through
major sacrifices, achieved tremendous combat results during a time when the
specter of a Japanese victory was extremely vivid in the immediate aftermath
of Pearl Harbor. Today, China holds the Flying Tigers in high regard.32 A
contemporary Chinese scholarly analysis of the origins of the Chinese Air
Bad Blood 35
Forces notes the significant role of the Flying Tigers and the US Fourteenth
Air Force that followed, though the author also observes that the numbers
of planes sent to China were insufficient and did not fulfill the many promises
of the US government.33 A recent Chinese scholarly paper published in
another military journal relates in admirable detail how Chinese Communist
soldiers rescued an American P-51 pilot, who was shot down in the vicinity of
Shanghai in January 1945.34 General Joseph Stillwell is similarly revered and
is also the topic of current Chinese scholarship.35 Given Stillwell’s deep and
quite unparalleled knowledge of and experience in China, another fascinating
counterfactual for scholars of US-China relations is to reflect on how and
whether this extraordinary persona might have made further contributions to
that relationship if he had lived beyond 1946.
From Brief Collaboration to Intense Conflagration
A debate among US scholars has concerned whether the Cold War break
between the United States and China was inevitable or was instead caused by
poor policy choices. Chen Jian argues quite convincingly that the “lost chance”
for a working diplomatic relationship between the new Communist regime in
Beijing and Washington is “a myth.” He writes: “The CCP’s [Chinese Communist
Party’s] adoption of an anti-American policy in 1949–50 had deep roots in
both China’s history and its modern experiences. Sharp divergences in political
ideology . . . and perceived national interests contributed to the shaping of
the Sino-American confrontation.”36 Indeed, such a result is hardly surprising,
given the vast material support that the United States had given to Chiang
Kai-shek’s forces—including, for example, a major airlift and sealift of half a
million Nationalist troops into areas previously occupied by the Japanese to
forestall their likely domination by Communist forces.37 America’s propensity
to “lean to one side” is also strongly suggested by a recent account published by
an American eyewitness to one set of the truce negotiations that Washington
attempted to facilitate with the famous, but failed, mediation mission of General
George Marshall during the years 1946–47.38 At least some contemporary
Chinese scholarship, however, suggests that the CCP went to great lengths in
1949 to engage with the United States, including making strenuous efforts to
ensure that no Americans were killed and no damage was done to US property
in the final phases of China’s civil war.39
The Korean War is exceptionally important to modern Chinese history
because it followed the founding of the People’s Republic of China by less
36 Meeting China Halfway
than a year and thus shaped many of its key institutions, not least the Chinese
military. However, the salience of that conflict is also clear, given that the
three-year war claimed the lives of 37,000 Americans and perhaps 250,000
or more Chinese, not to mention hundreds of thousands wounded and many
more than 1 million Korean casualties on both sides. The Korean War assumes
special importance for the purposes of this book, given that it was the last
time Washington and Beijing came to heavy military blows and, perhaps more
particularly, because this war represented a conflict that neither side sought
directly but that occurred anyhow.
A more complete review of recent revelations and conclusions regarding
the war from both Chinese and US sources is made in chapter 8, but a few
general issues can be raised at this point. First, it is widely known that a consensus
among the Chinese Communist leadership held that China should not
intervene in the Korean War. Marshal Lin Biao, for example, “argued that the
firepower of an American division was perhaps ten to twenty times more powerful
than its Chinese equivalent.”40 Mao overruled his colleagues in a risky
gambit based on “geopolitical and historical considerations.”41 Mao certainly
bears some culpability for the war, together with Joseph Stalin, but the real
impetus clearly came from Kim Il-sung himself. Chen claims that Mao had
told Stalin during his visit to Moscow in 1949–50 that he did not expect the
United States to become involved “in a revolutionary war in East Asia,” but
he also apparently sent 50,000 to 70,000 ethnic Korean soldiers from the
ranks of the People’s Liberation Army to assist Kim in his war preparations.
Thus, Chen concludes that “Mao virtually gave Kim’s plan a green light.”42
Mao suffered the personal tragedy of having his son killed in combat, but
China also lost what in retrospect was a golden opportunity to achieve unification
with Taiwan. As Thomas Christensen’s account of US decision making
in the early 1950s suggests, before the outbreak of the Korean War, President
Harry Truman had endorsed the recommendations of his State Department
that Taiwan should not be defended by American forces because that would
“deflect upon ourselves the righteous wrath of the Chinese people.”43 However,
that policy direction was quickly reversed, as the advocates of Taiwan
as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” gained new salience upon the outbreak of
hostilities in Korea because Washington viewed this as a prelude to a global
war with a united Communist Bloc. Those historical deliberations regarding
Taiwan are reviewed in greater detail in chapter 3.
The most important point to make regarding the Korean War concerns its
historiography, particularly that of Chinese scholars. Although in the United
Bad Blood 37
States, it is commonly referred to as the “forgotten war,” this is not the case
in China, where discussions of what is there called the War to Resist America
are quite ubiquitous. Many Americans will be taken aback to learn that
the Chinese consider the Korean War to have been a great victory. As Peter
Gries explains, the Korean War narrative plays an important role in contemporary
Chinese self-identity and nationalism: “Recent Chinese accounts of
the Korean War construct America as the best, and China as a victor over
America, thus making China ‘better than the best.’”44 Nonetheless, one can
find some introspection among Chinese depictions of this bloody conflict.
For example, an interview appearing in the progressive 财经 (Finance and
Economics) magazine with a former high-level diplomat makes the radical suggestion
(for the Chinese context) that the Sino-Soviet alliance was a mistake
that precipitated the Korean War.45
China’s economic failures during the period of Maoism, and especially
resulting from the great excesses of both the Great Leap Forward and the
Cultural Revolution, are well documented, at least in the West. The human
tragedy resulting from these failed policies has been better recorded in the
case of the Cultural Revolution, in part because those it most severely affected
were intellectuals, who are naturally positioned to share and reflect on their
experiences. And it is particularly important to consider that many of those
intellectuals who suffered grave harm were various leadership cadres—including,
for example, the father of Xi Jinping. In recent years, several treatments
of the Great Leap Forward have brought the full dimensions of the humanmade
tragedy into clearer relief based on new data and interview evidence.
Jasper Becker, for example, demonstrates the enormous reach of the famine
caused by Mao’s ideological zealotry. He describes how millions died, even in
Sichuan, which possesses some of the richest arable land in the world. In but
one small example from his epic study of the 1959–60 famine, Becker writes
of the situation in Henan: “Traveling around the region over thirty years later,
every peasant that I met aged over fifty years said he personally knew of a case
of cannibalism in his production team.”46 Chinese scholarship is far from open
in discussing this period. However, one noteworthy and somewhat remarkable
exception is a 2010 article published in 中共党史研究 (Chinese Communist
Party History Studies), which examined declassified American intelligence estimates
for China during this period. Rather surprisingly, the author praises the
estimates by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during this period for
certain “profound and incisive insights . . . that were not actually much different
from internal Chinese estimates.” The author only criticizes the CIA’s
38 Meeting China Halfway
analyses for underestimating the “irrational aspects of the Great Leap,” and he
is not coy with respect to its dramatic economic failure, though he does not
mention the catastrophic famine.47
If the quality of the CIA’s estimates comes in for praise from certain CCP
scholars, other American intelligence operations from the early Cold War
period have also come under new scrutiny, both in the United States and
in China. Many Americans may be surprised to realize the important role
played by the CIA in developing the international following for the current
Dalai Lama. According to a 2002 book by two former CIA agents that details
the history of the CIA’s operations into Tibet, the CIA not only played a key
role in getting the Dalai Lama out of Tibet in 1959 but also provided him
and his associates with funds for “rice and robes” for an indefinite period
afterward.48 The repeated failures and high costs of the CIA’s efforts in Tibet
apparently caused President Dwight Eisenhower to wonder in early 1960 if
“stoking resistance . . . only invite[ed] greater Chinese repression?”49 A story
detailing these revelations about the CIA’s activities in Tibet were described
in a 2011 Chinese article, which featured, among several stories connecting
historical events to current US surveillance practices, the cover story from a
popular magazine with the title “The Intelligence War of the US against China
through History.”50
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, US-China relations continued to boil on
rancorously, always on the verge of new hostilities. Although Chinese behavior
in the two Taiwan Strait disputes during the 1950s evinced certain cautious
tendencies, aiming not to prompt direct conflict with the United States, actions
such as the firing of 7,000 artillery rounds onto the tiny island of Jinmen on
one day in September 1954 could not quite be called risk-averse.51 Similarly,
it is not widely known that Beijing intervened quite actively to assist North
Vietnam against the United States. According to Qiang Zhai, “Beginning in
1965, China sent ground-to-air missiles, anti-aircraft artillery, railroad, engineering,
minesweeping, and logistics units . . . to help Hanoi. The total number
of Chinese troops in North Vietnam . . . amounted to over 320,000 [over
a three year span],” of which 1,000 were killed.52 The significance of this history
is not at all obscure in Chinese military circles—as revealed, for example,
in the mid-2014 cover story for a prominent quasi-military Chinese journal.
That story featured a number of detailed interviews with Chinese soldiers who
had participated in the air defense of Vietnam, and it included the claim that
Chinese units brought down a sum total of 597 US aircraft during the Vietnam
War.53 US-China crisis interaction during this period witnessed several
Bad Blood 39
instances when American leaders contemplated the possibility of employing
nuclear weapons against China and actively considered preventive strikes
against Chinese nuclear facilities in the early 1960s. Indeed, the frequency
of such deliberations may have contributed to the process whereby China’s
approach to nuclear weapons and to national security generally resembles an
adolescent who was abused in his youth.
A Bewildering and Fortunate Turn of Events
In the dark days at the height of the Vietnam War, the Nixon–Kissinger opening
to China represented a creative strategic gambit with extraordinary consequences.
The consequences for US-China relations have been quite well
appreciated, but the larger impact on the course of the Cold War may be
understated, given the immense resources Moscow henceforth had to devote
to its underdeveloped Far Eastern flank. Among several interesting revelations
to emerge in recent times is Kissinger’s brave admission that the conclusion by
the American leadership at the time that “the Soviet Union was the probable
aggressor, . . . [which] hid a larger design, . . . was mistaken. . . . Recent historical
studies have revealed that the Zhenbao Incident . . . [was] initiated by
the Chinese; . . . they had laid a trap.”54 Despite this apparent analytical error,
he relates, “It was a case of mistaken analysis leading to a correct judgment.”
Indeed, both Washington and Beijing have benefited enormously from the
four decades of peace and dynamic development that flowed from these initial
steps to break down the Cold War stalemate.
Much greater insight is now available concerning Chinese internal politics
and the key roles of various Chinese leaders in developing this completely
novel policy direction. Li Jie, a research professor for the CCP Central Committee,
explains: “During this period, the domestic situation in China interacted
with the Sino-US relationship, both as cause and as effect. National
security was the main consideration behind China’s decision to improve relations
with the United States, but changes in China’s diplomacy, away from the
leftist emotionalism and toward pragmatism, also had an important impact.”55
Rosemary Foot’s assessment of US diplomacy in this period also stresses the
impact of domestic politics and its close interrelationship with the very sensitive
Taiwan issue. She is critical of the “US tendency to engage in verbal
acrobatics that succeeded only in dizzying the spectators rather than clarifying
US objectives.”56 But she also suggests that “pursuit of . . . larger global aims
prompted US officials to give too much away.”57 The primary issue to which
40 Meeting China Halfway
she is referring—Taiwan, of course—is taken up in much more detail in chapter
3. Nevertheless, Kissinger’s recent account is certainly worth considering
as one ponders the kind of leadership and bureaucratic skill that might be
required to broker a more effective modus vivendi between Washington and
Beijing for the twenty-first century. Recalling the delicate steps that enabled
the opening, he writes, “Each side leaned over backward to avoid being perceived
as having made the first public move. . . . The result was a minuet so
intricate . . . that neither country needed to bear the onus of an initiative
that might be rejected.”58 It is worth emphasizing that during this period of
intense Chinese vulnerability vis-à-vis the Soviet threat, Beijing began to find
shelter—albeit with considerable uncertainty—under the conflict deterrence
system offered by US global strength and leadership, as so many other countries
had done during the Cold War.
Today, it is perhaps a sad commentary on US-China relations that scholars
on both sides of the Pacific are looking to apply lessons from that intense
rivalry in order to moderate tendencies toward rivalry in the contemporary
US-China relationship. In early May 2012 the New York Times sponsored a
forum to debate the question “Are we headed for a Cold War with China?”59
One Chinese scholar recently probed the significance of the so-called long
peace (特久和平), observing that this long peace existed under “the threat
of terror.” This Chinese analysis highlights the deleterious role of ideology in
intensifying the Cold War and prompting major policy errors, along with the
enormous waste of resources that resulted from the arms race. It concludes,
moreover, that Soviet attempts to build security belts (e.g., in Eastern Europe)
and American attempts to employ proxies in the developing world both backfired
strategically.60 This understanding of the Cold War and all its related
costs may yet help China and the United States avoid such a similar outcome
of intense rivalry.
President Xi Jinping is said to have a major interest in modern history.61 A
speech he gave on September 1, 2011, titled “Leadership Cadres Should Read
Up on History,” may be somewhat revealing regarding how modern Chinese
history has affected his worldview. Although he states emphatically that one of
China’s mistakes has been its failure to embrace foreign ideas, he dwells on the
impact of imperialism on China. He explains, “After the Opium War, . . . the
imperialist countries . . . relied on gunboats to conduct a military invasion,
causing innumerable massacres and butchering Chinese people. They forced
China to sign unequal treaties, ravaged Chinese territory, and destroyed its
judiciary, its customs, its trade, and its sovereignty over its own transportation
Bad Blood 41
system. They set up concessions, established military garrisons, propped up
and bribed proxies to support imperialism, and thus controlled the Chinese
government.”62
The speech goes on at length in this fashion and embraces both the Taiping
movement and the Boxer movement discussed earlier in this chapter. Historians
will debate the details of this interpretation—and so they should—but
for the purposes of this book, the central point is that the current Chinese
leadership holds this perspective on history, and this perspective is mainstream
“conventional wisdom” in contemporary China.
The United States did not play a leading role in most of these events, but
it did play a large role—for example, in the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion.
Even after the World War II victory that finally liberated China from
foreign oppression, the United States, under the guise of the struggle against
global communism, intervened frequently and on a large scale around China’s
periphery, eliciting strong hostility from Chinese nationalists that lingers to
this day. A Chinese worldview conditioned by the “century of humiliation”
strongly influences Chinese perspectives on the feasibility of building a stable
and constructive partnership with the United States.
Americans do not like apologies, and that path is not advocated here. As a
nation, the United States has done little to reflect on, and much less to seek
amends for, the glaringly obvious past wrongs of slavery and the subjugation
of native peoples.63 The Chinese leadership also has much to answer for in its
modern history. These issues are not immediately germane to the question of
how to create the conditions for substantive progress in US-China relations.
What is necessary to enable understanding and consideration of the solutions
advocated in this book is to simply realize that there is significant bad blood
in US-China relations. Because the United States, for better or worse, bears
the standard of the West in its role as a global leader generally and in East Asia
in particular, it must also accept that, as Fairbank put it, “The West expanded
into China, not China into the West.”64 Keeping this historical fact closely in
mind, and adding that the United States is still the much more powerful party,
I suggest that Washington both create the appropriate conditions for cooperation
spirals and also, crucially, make the first moves.
Notes
1. Rob Gifford, China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power (New York:
Random House, 2007), 41–42.
42 Meeting China Halfway
2. John King Fairbank, The United States and China, Fourth Edition (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 308.
3. Macabe Keliher, “Anglo-American Rivalry and the Origins of US/China
Rivalry,” Diplomatic History 31 (April 2007): 237.
4. 张小明 [Zhang Xiaoming], 美国与东亚关系导论 [An Introduction to
the History of US-East Asian Relations] (Beijing: Peking University Press,
2010), 19.
5. Ibid., 22.
6. John R. Haddad, America’s First Adventure in China: Trade, Treaties, Opium, and
Salvation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 135.
7. Conversely, a legitimate school of thought maintains that China’s relative decline
versus Europe antedates this conflict. According to this logic, the Opium War
was a symptom rather than a cause of China’s precipitous decline.
8. 胡斌 [Hu Bin], “鸦片战争时期粱章钜海防思想浅论” [A Brief Discussion
of Liang Zhangju’s Coastal Defense Thinking at the Time of the Opium War],
军事历史研究 [Military Historical Research], March 2012, 69.
9. 曲庆玲 [Qu Qingling], “试论第一次鸦片战争时期的虎门海防要塞建设”
[A Preliminary Discussion Regarding the Coastal Fortifications Built at Humen
during the First Opium War], 军事历史研究 [Military Historical Research],
March 2012, x. A broader conception of modern Chinese history, however,
might also note that the Han Chinese have themselves resorted to occasional
aggression; e.g., “the Jungars, . . . a Mongol people, . . . were virtually exterminated
by Manchu troops in 1758–59.” Svat Soucek, A History of Inner Asia
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 18.
10. Fairbank, United States and China, 312–15.
11. Keliher, “Anglo-American Rivalry,” 245–46.
12. Kemp Tolley, Yangtze Patrol: The US Navy in China (Annapolis: Naval Institute
Press, 1971), 12–13.
13. Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and
Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (New York: Random House, 2012), 28.
14. Ibid., 47.
15. Ibid., 75–76.
16. Ibid., 314.
17. 张小明 [Zhang Xiaoming], 美国与东亚关系导论 [An Introduction to
the History of US-East Asian Relations], 24.
18. Ibid., 33.
19. Ibid., 29. The extraordinary medical feats of Dr. Peter Parker, an American
missionary, in Canton before the Opium War are detailed by Haddad, America’s
First Adventure, 99–109.
Bad Blood 43
20. 魏延秋 [Wei Yanqiu], “近代外国势力对我国边疆之文化侵略浅析” [A
Cursory Analysis of the Cultural Invasion of Our Country’s Borders by Foreign
Forces], 军事历史研究 [Military Historical Research], no. 2 (2009): 95.
21. James Bradley, The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War (Boston:
Little, Brown, 2009), 284–85.
22. 张小明 [Zhang Xiaoming], 美国与东亚关系导论 [An Introduction to
the History of US-East Asian Relations], 45.
23. This is from the author’s visit to the Tianjin City Museum in March 2010.
24. Bradley, Imperial Cruise, 292–93.
25. Ibid., 297.
26. Tolley, Yangtze Patrol, 169.
27. Jonathan Spence, Mao Zedong (New York: Penguin 1999), 18–19.
28. James C. Bradford, “Epilogue,” in Diplomats in Blue: US Naval Officers in
China, 1922–1933, by William Braisted (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
2009), 350.
29. Ibid., 139.
30. Ibid., 67.
31. Ibid., 341.
32. See, e.g., “The Flying Tigers Hold High Honor in China,” China Net, www
.china.org.cn/english/NM-e/142991.htm.
33. 古琳晖 [Gu Linhui], “全面抗战时期中国空军建设述评” [Commentary
on the Many Aspects of Air Force Building during the War of Resistance], 军事
历史研究 [Military Historical Research], no. 2 (2009): 73, 77.
34. 高志林, 张德义 [Gao Zhilin and Zhang Deyi], “新四军浙东游击纵队救
护美国飞行员始末” [The Course of the Rescuing of an American Pilot by the
Guerrilla Column of the New Fourth Army in Eastern Zhejiang], 军事历史
[Military History], no. 5 (2007): 72–74. In Mainland China, historians are also
reappraising the delicate issue of the contribution of the Kuomintang to Japan’s
defeat. On that issue, see Qiang Zhang and Robert Weatherley, “Owning Up
to the Past: The KMT’s role in the War against Japan and the Impact on CCP
Legitimacy,” Pacific Review 26 (2013): 221–42.
35. 范德伟 [Fan Dewei], “将介石和史迪威的分歧与中国远征军入缅作战
失败” [The Divergent Opinions of Jiang Jieshi and Stillwell and the Battle Lost
by the Chinese Expeditionary Force in Burma], 军事历史 [Military History],
May 2010, 38–45.
36. Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2001), 48.
37. Fairbank, United States and China, 342.
44 Meeting China Halfway
38. Sidney Rittenberg and Amanda Bennett, The Man Who Stayed Behind (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 62.
39. 杨斐, 李莹 [Yang Fei and Li Ying], “试论渡江役与中美关系” [Regarding
the Campaign to Cross the Yangtze River and US-China Relations],
军事历史 [Military History], no. 2 (2010): 41.
40. Yu Bin, “What China Learned from Its ‘Forgotten War,’” in PLA Warfighting:
The PLA Experience since 1949, eds. Mark Ryan, David Finkelstein, and
Michael McDevitt (London: M. E. Sharpe, 2003), 124.
41. Ibid., 124.
42. Chen Jian, Mao’s China, 54–55.
43. Thomas Christensen, Useful Adversaries: Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization,
and Sino-American Conflict, 1947–58 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1996), 120.
44. Peter Hays Gries, China’s New Nationalism: Pride, Politics, and Nationalism
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 57.
45. 马国川 [Ma Guochuan], “何方: 中苏同盟的历史启示” [He Fang: Revelations
concerning the History of the Sino-Soviet Alliance], 财经 [Finance and
Economics], April 1, 2013, 97–98.
46. Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (New York: Holt, 1996),
118, 150.
47. 姚昱 [Yao Yu], “二十世纪五六十年代美国中央情报局对中国经济状况
情报评估” [Intelligence Estimates of the American Central Intelligence
Agency regarding the Chinese Economy in the 1950s and 1960s], 中共党史
研究 [Chinese Communist Party History Studies], no. 1 (2010): 38, 42–43.
48. Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison, The CIA’s Secret War in Tibet (Lawrence:
University of Kansas Press, 2002), 157.
49. Ibid., 134.
50. 益多 [Yi Duo], “中情局与’藏独’秘密战” [The CIA and the Secret War for
Tibetan Independence], 军事世界 [Military World], July 2011, 31.
51. Regarding the Taiwan Strait crises, see Xiaobing Li, “PLA Attacks and
Amphibious Operations during the Taiwan Strait Crises of 1954–55 and
1958,” in Chinese Warfighting, 150; and Niu Jun, “Chinese Decision Making
in the Three Military Actions across the Taiwan Strait,” in Managing SinoAmerican
Crises: Case Studies and Analysis, ed. Michael Swaine and Zhang
Tuosheng (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
2006), 293–326.
52. Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975 (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2000), 137.
53. 吴佩新 [Wu Peixin], “中国人的越战” [A Chinese Man’s Vietnam War],
航空知识 [Aerospace Knowledge], May 2014, 44–49.
Bad Blood 45
54. Henry Kissinger, On China (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), 217. See also
Lyle Goldstein, “Return to Zhenbao Island: Who Started Shooting and Why It
Matters,” China Quarterly 168 (December 2001): 985–97.
55. Li Jie, “China’s Domestic Politics and Sino-US Normalization,” in Normalization
of US-China Relations, ed. William R. Kirby, Robert S. Ross, and Gong
Li (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 63.
56. Rosemary Foot, “Prizes Won, Opportunities Lost: The US Normalization of
Relations with China, 1972–79” in Normalization of US-China Relations, ed.
Kirby, Ross, and Gong Li, 99.
57. Ibid., 114.
58. Kissinger, On China, 220.
59. “Are We Headed for a Cold War with China?” New York Times, May 2, 2012,
www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/05/02/are-we-headed-for-a-cold-war
-with-china/.
60. 吕雪 [Lu Xue], “对冷战时期美苏两国国家战略选择经验和教训的思
考” [Experience and Lessons of American and Soviet National Strategic Choices
during the Cold War], 军事历史 [Military History], no. 2 (2008): 50–51.
61. From the relevant US diplomatic notes, it is said that Xi “particularly likes
Hollywood movies about World War II and hopes Hollywood will continue to
make them. Hollywood makes those movies well, and such Hollywood movies
are grand and truthful.” See “US Embassy Cables,” The Guardian, December 4,
2010, www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/100934.
62. 习近平 [Xi Jinping], “领导干部要读点历史” [Leadership Cadres Should
Read a Little History], 中共党史研究 [Historical Research on the Chinese
Communist Party], October 2011, 8.
63. See, e.g., Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, May 21,
2014, www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/
361631/.
64. Fairbank, United States and China, 170.
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